For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation.
This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling.
Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.
You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away.
That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.
Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well.
One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.
And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)
*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.
This has come up a few times in things I've written recently, when I've mentioned almost as an aside that I generally prefer not to have everything neatly explained by the end of a narrative, whether that's in a game or a book or a movie. I do need to feel that the full story is in there somewhere but I , personally, do not always have to know what it is.
ReplyDeleteAesthetically that feels more satisfying to me but I'd have thought it was also likely to be commercially preferable as well. Those lengthy, post-cinema discussions where everyone argues about what certain things in a movie meant and speculates about what might have happened to the characters after the movie ended are what drives great word of mouth and gives movies or books or games a long life after the first burst of interest.
Of course, you can take it too far, as supposedly the TV show Lost did, although even there it didn't seem to harm the commercial success of that show (Which I haven't seen, by the way, so I have no idea if the lack of a neat explanation for everything made artistiic sense or just looked like even the writers didn't really have a clue what was going on...)
Yeah, I was also thinking of the ending to The Sopranos as well. I never understood how people were all upset about the ending's ambiguity, given that the entire premise of the show at the beginning was Tony Soprano seeing a shrink, and at the end he was having a night out with his family, a normal activity that a normal, well adjusted family would do. Only that him and his family were anything but.
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