Unpopular Opinion: All Narrative is Linear

[Music] hey guys um so housekeeping I have been asked to ask you to move towards the center and be friends with your pal next store to you um and then afterwards to fill out your evaluations um so this is so great to be presenting at the narrative Summit I always look forward to being with such Kindred Spirits for these couple days um so this session it's called unpopular opinion all narrative is linear very strategically placed right after a talk about nonlinear narrative so it's going well uh so clearly I was reading a buzzfeed article when I wrote this um um so I'm Amy a lot of folks give an introduction here um but I think the best way to know me is to know how I came to understand stories and consequently how I approach game design

so I'll jump right in all narrative is linear movies books Aristotle life songs the heroes Journey Sports and even games that seem like they couldn't possibly be so for mobas with stories emerging from Cooperative gameplay to strategy games with compelling core Loops to branching experiences to sandblock games to open worlds even to games with elongated aesthetic distances stemming from Ludo narrative distance all follow the same structure as all narratives have for thousands of years when it comes to our work as game makers the core Loop is not a story it's a possibility space unravel the loop and you will see a player's actual narrative because until we can change the time space continuum players will always experience narratives linearly so what does this look like

we've seen this structure before we all probably have some variation of Mrs Hodge in elementary school giving you your first essay and being told it has to have an introductory paragraph and a thesis and a few body paragraphs on that thesis and a conclusion but why it's The Human Experience which can be summed up so simply as tracking tension over time because isn't that life swells of emotion good and bad over the time we're given so maybe that's not so controversial that players experience narrative linearly because because time but I think what is an unpopular opinion is that this way of looking at games needs to be Central to our development processes because one it creates a tool for speaking directly to the hearts of our players and two it acts as a common

language for multi-disciplinary teams so what is this language we see it clearly in movies introduction girl is sad inciting incident Girl Meets Boy a question is asked will girl get boy it's always a yes or no question rising action Shenanigans UE a series of hurdles related to that main question climax Drew Barry Moore stands in a ball field and after what seems like forever she has the most epic camera spinning kiss did girl get boy yes the climax always answers that question whether it be yes or no finally the resolution and indication of what's to come for Drew Barrymore a hint of happily ever after it's also the story of Life conception trimesters birth it's also a sports game so my

training is originally in theater and I had a professor who said he was Bulgarian so I'm going to do an atrocious accent he'd say why would people rather watch sport than theater because in sport one ball in bad theater many [Laughter] balls meaning in a compelling story we're only tracking one thing at a time so when I'm in a really good play I can turn around and watch the audience heads all move in unison as if they're watching an invisible ball when I learned these narrative roles no longer were my plays Hit or Miss suddenly there was a formula to a range emotions into an almost musical composition there was this answer I I had been waiting for the Holy Grail of Timeless Tales perfectly linear narrative then I joined the games and

industry y'all messed it up with your core loops and your branching narrative charts and your progression spreadsheets and wireframes and player metrics and ux flows and even a linear tutorial or two which is even more confusing so back when I was a weas Circa 2013 I got my start in mobile games and I was so excited to take my knowledge of story structure and make experiences that were incredibly human I did learn very quickly that there is a tension between being human and the realities of game development I like the uh the Red Bull and the ice coffee combo on the desk there uh so making games requires translating experiences into software a language of zeros and ones consequently top down ways of speaking about games

our our core Loops our state machines our metrics and so on are incredibly valuable any developer will tell you that building a game that actually works is a battle but any developer will also tell you that there's another battle that feeling of disconnect the late night despair of losing sight of why a game speaks to our hearts that battle is just as real for me my feeling of Disconnect came from not speaking the same language as our team leaders having come from a different field I wasn't able to translate these top down metrics and Loops into something I could meaningfully contribute to this is what happens when you get a together a bunch of people who are at the top of their various fields in engineering and business and design and art and production all these people that it requires to take a game make a game these days the language we use to talk about experiences is anything but linear

and anything but standardized which is exciting I'm a big fan of diversity and all of its forms but it also creates a very real tension in communication on teams as a Storyteller in a zeros and ones world I felt lost so I've read Jesse Shell's book The Art of game design at book of lenses and I thought he put things really well there are progressive games where there is a linear story and there are Emer games where gameplay is King books are progressive because you turn the page and the story progresses and chess is emergent because the gameplay emerges from the players it's Dynamic it's highly replayable I was so happy to finally understand how what I did related to games but there was this terrifying fear bubbling underneath the fear that The Closer games got to the emerging end of the spectrum the more my skills were unwanted to combat this spere I went to

work making epic story lines with lore and backstory and Nuance I stay up late creating my narrative vision and wonder why they couldn't see that epic story lines are exactly what every broad appeal Mass Market casual mobile title needs one day someone I trusted pulled me aside and said you know what this game just doesn't need story it's hard not to hear that as this game just doesn't need you well I thought I really only have one option I'm going to completely disregard everything anyone says and make a new theory of game design to prove them wrong so here it is oh so Amy's theory on how all games are linear we're going to go look at three experiences Jaws life is strength strange in Minecraft all on a different

place on the Spectrum and each one getting a little Messier on how to prove that linear narrative works on the most Progressive games and also ones that break all the rules Jaws so truly linear narrative cannot be a game a game implies player interaction instead we'll look at the structure of a movie one that is expertly crafted to hit all the traditional storytelling Beats jaw starts with a shark attack but don't mistake this for the inciting incident we have not met our protagonist yet so it can't be enter Chief Brody now that our hero is here the Call to Adventure can happen Chief Brody reads the coroner's resport Coroner's report shark attack the question is asked will Chief Brody kill the shark yes or no during the rising action complications arise all to do with this question of killing the shark first a

child is killed then Chief Brody's own kid is in the water when a surfer gets killed next Brody and his two psychics they get on a boat a big boat Quinn and the Quinn the Sea Dog gets eaten by a shark Hooper the oceanographer is in danger Brody himself is in danger and then there's the climax no question that Chief Bry did indeed kill that shark it's it's dead he's pretty dead finally the resolution gives a hint of what's to come so if you actually watch the the end of the credits you'll see that Brody and Hooper get back to shore so obviously this is a movie but if we pretended it was a game and we took three different players they would all have the same linear path through that experience so let's see how that changes when we talk about life is Strange Life Is Strange stunning game by don't know published by square enex you

play Max and Max has the power to rewind time to make a different choice for all intents and purposes life is strange is a very traditional narrative it happens to be branching so this is a whole talking of itself but in life is strange the entire Series has a traditional narrative structure as does its five episodes as does each individual scene we're going to look at the Frank confrontation scene in episode four it's a little microcosm for what we're talking about um it demonstrates that even with branching narrative every individual path follows the same linear structure rules introduction all three players have the same experience so far Max and Khloe need a Client List from their friendly neighborhood drug dealer Frank inciting incident Chloe knocks on the door no turning back will will they get that Client List yes or

no rising action negotiations begin Frank does not trust them this is where it splits depending on how you negotiate you can either tap into Frank's emotions and soften him up you can upset him and set his dog on the attack or things can go south and Chloe can pull a gun these are all relevant to that central question of getting that Client List and they all grow in emotional intensity consequently all three choices are satisfying and allow for a level of meaningful player choice that a purely Progressive experience couldn't likewise when we get to the climax there are three meaningful choices Frank can give The Client List willingly Chloe can injure Frank causing him to give it not so willingly or Khloe can kill Frank and take The Client List off his body so will Max and Chloe get The Client List all paths lead to yes but the journey is different

and finally in the scene's resolution if Frank doesn't die the girls walk away relieved if he does there's an emotional to toll that is carried through the rest of the game here is the developer chart of all the branching paths in this scene when I saw this I it blew me away at how much play your agency there is but this is a very tough top down way of looking at the scene which is useful for implementation but if we kind of Turn It 90° you'll see the linear narrative which is extremely useful for emotion every player is hitting the same beats the same complications but their story is different a developer's ability to map the music of emotions is an incredible tool not only for giving players compelling stories but for getting a team on the same page I'll go into more detail on that at the end of

the talk for me when I started looking at branching narrative in a similar way that I might look at jaws it was a real aha moment as Oprah Winfrey might call it because if you extrapolate on this idea that each player path creates a traditional story structure and you consider that each scene each episode and each series also has that structure you can extrapolate how these branching and nested structures could grow infinitely to become a three-dimensional sandbox light game and that's what we're going to talk about when we talk about Minecraft and emergent games at first glance when looking at Minecraft it is confusing to see the narrative there doesn't seem to be an end you choose your play style night and day give some semblance of story structure and then there's creative mode and where is the story there what am I missing the open world is a good metaphor for all the possibilities for

paths a player might take we often talk about different player types or different gameplay Styles when we talk about sandbox games so why is that in particular so important because suddenly the player is the protagonist which makes the player's inciting incident the discovery of what they're driven to accomplish will I build an epic house will I become the best baddy killer in the land will I connect with my friends so as it happens my friend Katherine is player type number three so I asked her to tell me her experience of playing Minecraft so we'll use it to break down what that looks like using good old linear narrative structure introduction I started playing because my friend were playing I'd wait to play

until other people were online we use Discord and we would chat about the game beforehand and then chat ingame so Katherine's introduction is actually outside the game in this case inciting incident we all started in different places and we had to find each other using landmarks so this is the moment her question is posed will I connect with my friends complication one in the rising action we first explored what this place was a sense of the unknown I don't remember having a tutorial but I remember seeing nothing in my inventory i spun around in a circle thinking where am I then I thought Lush and green equals safe Snowy Mountains equals harder I should stay in the green area so she wants to find her friends but she doesn't know the rules yet complication two I found my friends and we wanted to build a fortress first we build our own houses but when a friend left we built his for him we made a huge Fortress and Incorporated our

personalities someone put torches in a large staircase to make it look Regal first we used the resources that were there but then I learned you can make anything so I'd go get things and bring them back to safety the goal was to build a house no matter what and it didn't hit me until night time that I could die complication three that first night I was outside I didn't realized there were creatures and I was not prepared I just really wanted to make Roes I think it was a skeleton SHO arrows I was like what is that then I died I didn't make a bed so I had to find my friends again but I learned and made a bed armor and a weapon to fight with so while a different player might be focused on fighting in weapons for Catherine this was a means to an end climax then I learned you could set a house on fire so we set our friends houses on fire and started the process all over again so the reason I think this is the climax is it takes a certain level of

friendship to grief your friend and get away with it so for Catherine did I did I connect with my friends yes well I certainly hope so and finally the resolution I was focused on my main objective which was a million ways to get stuff to build with you learn to craft and then there's color materials I thought now I want to build a purple house this changes everything I need wool I need to dye wool so this gives us a hint of what's to come Katherine has built her friend community and now is going to master crafting but the cool thing about Minecraft is this moment is not just the resolution it's the inciting incident for another story so you can see if we just take a top down approach to analyzing all the different player paths collectively it looks like nonsense but if we translate it into a

familiar linear structure we can track the music of each player and plan to put things into the sandbox that satisfies each intrinsic Drive even though maybe the players redefine their story at some point maybe player one is playing for a week maybe player three is playing for three years the rules are the same what's different is that I am the protagonist my story is the story I ask the questions so I promised you my theory on game design and here it is all games from the most Progressive to the most emergent follow linear structure however we're not really talking about a spectrum of story structure we're talking about a spectrum of identity when I talk about the main character do I say they or do I say I the Spectrum moves what is so special about games though even as I say that

the truth is most media are transitioning closer to the eye end of the spectrum we don't just watch videos we comment and post and make it our own experience so as our media diversifies the ability to simplify the truth of Human Experience into something we can all analyze becomes more essential so to tie this together I begin by saying this approach is important because it one creates a tool for speaking directly to players hearts and two it acts as a common language for multidisiplinary teams so how do we begin to shift our language how do we translate the micro of our separate disciplines economies systems art Loops into Common Ground I think like most things in games it's iterative I've seen great leaders and peers with different styles one of my favorite examples is an analyst coming up with a way to look at which animals are players liked best based on

the animals cuddle ability factor I thought that was such a great example of empathy for the player story it changes the question from will I get a new animal to will I get the most cuddleable animal ever which is so simple and inspirational for everyone on the team so how to shift language could be a session in in and of itself but if I could offer one takeaway it would be this moment this idea of the ball the shark The Client List the Friendship because when you identify what a player is after you can open that question up to a team will they get the ball in the end zone will he kill the shark will they get The Client List will I find my friends the beautiful thing is that there are many paths to answer that question and the terrible thing is that there are many paths to answer that question which is why people are so reluctant to pose

it but I read this article about diversity recently and it argued that the strength of diversity in all its forms is not that we're Kum by a and we all get along no humans are naturally distrustful of anything unlike us so we question others ideas and they question us so diversity demands critical thinking and critical thinking has never been more important nor has media or entertainment and the stories we choose to tell if you can be ruthless in defining the question but open them the path for solving for the answer you've created a shared starting place for a singular narrative with infinite possibilities thank you [Applause]