Dramatic Elements: Premise, Story and Characters

1. Dramatic Elements: Premise, Story and Characters

2. Review: Formal Elements • Players • Objectives • Procedures • Rules • Resources • Conflict • Boundaries What are some examples of these elements in games?

3. Dramatic Elements • Now let’s look at dramatic elements of games. They help immerse a player into a game. • Premise, Characters and Story. • Types of Play • Competitive, Chance-based, Make-believe • Types of Players • The Competitor • The Explorer • The Collector • The Achiever • The Joker • The Director • The Storyteller • ThePerformer • The Craftsman • The Artist Let’s break this down into more detail……

4. Types of Play • In addition to providing structured environments for challenge and achievement, games can also provide opportunities for players to use imagination, fantasy, inspiration, social skills, or other more playful types of interaction to achieve objectives within the game space. The play might be serious, like the pomp and circumstance surrounding a Grand Master match in chess, or it might be charged and aggressive, like the marathon play environment of a Quake tournament. It might also be an outlet for fantasy, like the rich online worlds of EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. • Designing for the type of play that will appeal to your players is another key consideration for keeping players engaged with the game. Think about this when designing your group project or your own games.

5. Types of Players • ● Competitor: plays to best other players, regardless of the game. • ● Explorer: curious about the world, loves to go adventuring. Explorers seek outside boundaries-physical or mental. • ● Collector: acquires items, trophies, or knowledge, the collector likes to create sets, organize history, etc. • ● Achiever: plays for varying levels of achievement. Ladders and levels incentivize the achiever. • ● Joker: doesn't take the game seriously-plays for the fun of playing. There's a potential for jokers to annoy serious players. On the other hand, jokers can make the game more social than competitive. • ● Artist: driven by creativity, creation, design. • ● Director: loves to be in charge, direct the play. • ● Storyteller: loves to create or live in worlds of fantasy and imagination. • ● Performer: loves to put on a show for others. • ● Craftsman: wants to build, craft, engineer, or puzzle things out • WHAT TYPE OF PLAYER ARE YOU?

6. Premise • In addition to challenge and play, games also use several traditional elements of drama to create player engagement with their formal systems. One of the most basic is the concept of premise, which establishes the action of the game within a setting or metaphor. Without a dramatic premise, many games would be too abstract for players to become emotionally invested in their outcome. • In traditional drama, premise is established in the exposition of a story. Exposition sets up the time and place, characters and relationships, the prevailing status quo, etc.

7. Other important elements of story that may be addressed in the exposition are the problem, which is the event that upsets the status quo and creates the conflict; and the point of attack, which is the point at which the problem is introduced and the plot begins. While there's not a direct one-to-one relationship, these last two elements of exposition are mirrored in our definition of formal game elements by the concepts of objective and starting action discussed in the previous unit.

8. To better understand premise, let's look at some examples from well-known stories from films and books rather than games: • In Star Wars, the story is set in a far away galaxy. The protagonist, Luke Skywalker, is a young man who wants to get away from his uncle's remote farm and join the interstellar rebellion, but responsibility and loyalty hold him back. The story begins when his uncle buys two droids carrying secret information that is critical to the rebellion. • In The Fellowship of the Ring, the story is set in Middle-earth, a fantasy world of strange races and characters. The protagonist, Frodo Baggins, is a young Hobbit who is happy right where he is-at home. The story begins when Frodo inherits a ring from his uncle, which turns out to be a powerful artifact, the existence of which threatens the safety of all of Middle-earth.

9. As can be seen from the aforementioned examples, the premise sets the time and place, the main character(s) and objective, as well as the action which propels the story forward.

10. Let's look at examples of premise from games that you may have played. In a game, the premise may be as complex as those previous, involving characters with dramatic motivations, or a game's premise may simply be a metaphor overlaying what would otherwise be an abstract system.

11. First, here is a very simple game premise: in Space Invaders, the game is set on a planet, presumably Earth, which is attacked by aliens. You play an anonymous protagonist responsible for defending the planet from the invaders. The story begins when the first shot is fired. Clearly this premise has none of the richness that we see in the earlier stories. It does, however, have a simplicity and effectiveness that made it very powerful as a game premise. No player needed to read the backstory of Space Invaders to feel the tension of the steadily approaching aliens.

12. Now, let's look at some games that have attempted to create somewhat more developed premises. In Pitfall, the game is set in the 'deep recesses of a forbidden jungle.'[11] You play Pitfall Harry, a 'world famous jungle explorer and fortune hunter extraordinaire.' Your goal is to explore the jungle and find hidden treasures, while surviving various hazards like holes, logs, crocodiles, quicksand, etc. The story begins when you enter the jungle.

13. The Story • Storytelling The basic structure of a good plot was discovered a long time ago. It’s called the three-act structure. Aristotle first identified it in his Poetics, which gives it the kind of halo that sometimes makes ideas seem unapproachable. But his point is very simple: A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

14. Character Development Excerpted from book Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition

15. Characters Development • Character design is an important aspect of telling stories and evoking an emotional response in both stories and games. Whether it’s based on the visual look of the character or the emotional depth of the back story, the character we play and those we interact with help make the game world believable to us. Heroes, villains, innocents in distress, and bystanders: Without these characters to carry us forward, the game would be an empty shell.

16. Goals of Character Design • A character need not be attractive in the conventional sense of being pleasant to look at, but he must be competently constructed—well drawn or well described. His various attributes should work together harmoniously; his body, clothing, voice, animations, facial expressions, and other characteristics should all join to express him and his role clearly to the player. • The game industry uses the term avatar to refer to a character in a game who serves as a protagonist under the player’s control.

17. Player and Avatar Relationship • Most action and action-adventure games provide exactly one avatar. Many role-playing games allow the player to manage a party of characters and switch control from one to another, but if winning a role-playing game is contingent upon the survival of a particular member of the party, then that character is effectively the player’s avatar (though some games require that more than one character survive). • The player usually sees the avatar onscreen more than any other character if the game is presented in the third person. Displaying the avatar requires the largest number of animations, which must also be the smoothest animations, or you risk annoying the player. The avatar’s movements must be attractive, not clumsy, unless clumsiness is part of the avatar’s character.

18. Visual Appearance • Many designers, especially those who are visually inclined, start to create a character by thinking about her visual appearance first. If the character doesn’t exhibit a complex personality and she doesn’t change much during the course of the game—either behaviorally or visually—then this is often the best way to do it. Such an approach is called art-driven character design. It works well for games with fairly simple, cartoonlike characters. Art-driven design also makes a lot of sense if you hope to exploit the character in a number of other media besides video games: comic books and toys, for example.

19. Character Depth • The visual appearance of a character makes the most immediate impact on the player, and you can convey a lot of information about the character through his appearance, but you can’t convey everything. Nor does his appearance necessarily determine what role he will play in a story, how he will behave in different situations, or how he will interact with the game’s core mechanics. To address those issues, you have to give your attention to deeper questions about who the character is and how he behaves. • If you begin your character design with the character’s role, personality, and behavior rather than his appearance, you are doing story-driven character design. In story-driven design, you decide these things first and only then let the artists begin to develop a physical appearance for the character. Artists often like to work from a detailed description; it helps them to understand and visualize the character.

20. Sound Effects and Music (Audio Design) • The sounds a character makes tell us something about her personality, even if she doesn’t speak. Sounds—anything from a gunshot, to a shouted “Hi-yah!” accompanying a karate chop, to a verbal “Aye, aye, sir”—confirm acceptance of the player’s command. Sounds also signal injury, damage, or death. The sound of a punch that we’re all familiar with from the movies is in fact quite unrealistic, but we’re used to it and we know what that THWAP! means when we hear it. • Likewise, drowning people don’t really go “glug glug glug,” but that’s what we expect. Much of sound design involves meeting psychological expectations. Deep sounds suggest slow and strong characters; high sounds suggest light and fast ones. The tone of the sound a thing makes should confirm and harmonize with its visual texture: metallic objects make metallic sounds. As usual, however, incongruity can be funny, so you can mismatch sounds and visuals on purpose for comedic effect. As you define your character’s movements and behaviors, think about what sounds should be associated with her.

21. Activity • With your partner(s), look over the handout provided by your instructor on Types of Characters and Parts of a Story. Go over the details of both. • Make your selection from the basket or cup, of the activity your group will do. Do NOT share what your group is doing. We will try to guess. • Be creative and appropriate! • Good Luck!!!!

22. References • John Feil & Marc Scattergood – Richard Rouse III: Game Design Theory & Practice • – Brent Fox: Game Interface Design • – Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman: Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games • – Dr. Stuart Brown and David Kennard: The Promise of Play • – Richard Bartle, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit MUDs – Rudy Rucker: Software Engineering and Computer Games • – Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics • – Steven Conway: A Circular Wall? • – Ernest Adams: Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion • Further Reading – Chris Crawford: The Art of Computer Game Design • – RaphKoster: A Theory of Fun for Game Designers • – Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman: Rules of Play