Quest Design in Other Media

 What is the quest design of Lord of the Rings?

That’s the question that started me down a winding path and led me on my own grand adventure of discovery and personal growth, and that’s the question I’m here today to help answer. 

In this article I’m going to look at quest design in a variety of non-games ranging across nearly every genre I could find. By the end of this article, I’m hoping you can walk away with a better understanding of how to look at media in order to learn about game design, specifically focusing on quest design.

Will you accept this mission?

[Yes] / [No]

Ok, so that was cheesy, but I did that to highlight something. In games we’ve arrived at a convention with our quest-givers, in that we expect there to be one. We expect to see an NPC standing around with a big icon over their head telling us that we need to help them by going off into the forest and killing fifteen Dire Rats, or whatever. At least that’s what we expect in open world titles. When you look at a game like Tony Hawk Pro Skater, you get quests simply by choosing the location where you want to play, and you’re given all the various quests for that area when you arrive there. Mario 64 is another game where you are given quests based on selection of an area, but in that game those quests are accessed linearly. JRPGs, like Final Fantasy, tend to string you along on one giant series of quests, dropping sidequests for you as a diversion to keep up the pacing (and doing so in a way very similar to the exclamation-over-the-head style of quest giving). 

But what about other media? How does our hero get a quest in a film? Or a book? What are their narrative devices? And once we’ve gotten the quest, what maintains interest as we go about the task of completing it? After that, what do we get as a reward for completing the quest? 

I’m looking at a number of films (many of which are based on written stories) to answer those questions. The stories were chosen for a combination of reasons, some at random, some because I like them, some because I think they make good examples. In all cases my goal isn’t to point to these stories for any particular reason, but rather to look at a broad enough range that you can understand how to examine other stories I’ve not included here. Hopefully you’ll find enough use in this to want to do your own studies. 

So anyway, let’s get rolling!

Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings is a trilogy of novels I probably don’t have to describe here, but I’ll touch loosely anyway. Our protagonist, Frodo, finds out his uncle has been keeping an ancient ring of power, and that said ring attracts the forces of darkness to it. The only way to be rid of it is to throw it into the volcano where it was made.

How does he get this quest? Gandalf, a wizard friend of the family, shows up one day for Uncle Bilbo’s birthday. While visiting, Gandalf finds out about the ring and has a suspicion about it, which he goes off to investigate. He then returns to give Frodo a first quest: bring the ring to the elves. After this, Frodo leaves with his friend Sam to bring the ring to the elves, far away. However, that’s not the main quest. The main quest is the volcano-throwing version, and that comes once Frodo arrives at the elf village. This quest no one gives to Frodo at all. Instead, there’s a big discussion over who should get the quest, and Frodo offers himself once he understands the need. If this were a game, Frodo would have been given the quest in standard fashion by Gandalf, but then once he completed that quest and got its reward, he would simply continue on without being prompted for a new quest. 

Ok, so once Frodo is on this quest, what makes it interesting? Well the Nazgul, primarily. So long as Frodo holds the ring, undead wraiths called the Nazgul are drawn to him. He can’t possibly defeat them, so he must avoid their gaze. They only know his specific location if he wears the ring, so the forces of evil send out armies to cover the world, and Frodo must use the ring’s invisibility to avoid them, which draws the Nazgul. There’s also the ring itself which exerts its will on Frodo’s mind, making him want to wear it. The tension of both the desire and need to wear the ring, set against the danger of wearing the ring, is what drives most of the story. Throughout all of this with the Nazgul, Frodo also cannot simply walk into Mordor. He must find dangerous side paths hidden from sight of the evil armies, but filled to the brim with other horrors. Every path Frodo can choose is dangerous in one way or another, and it’s up to him and his companions to choose the danger they think they have the best chance against.

Once the quest is over, the reward is quite simply a return to normalcy. Frodo earns the respect of the people of the world, but his primary reward is to go home and relax for a while. And after such a journey, there’s nothing more that Frodo wants. The more tangible rewards are just icing on the cake, and not given all that much emphasis in the story.

Star Wars

Star Wars is a trilogy of movies in a similar sort of vein to Lord of the Rings. Protagonist Luke Skywalker is a nobody being raised on a farm on a backwoods planet, when suddenly two robots come into his life with a quest that someone must complete for the safety of millions. Luke is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets swept away on this quest along with a mentor who teaches him about the galaxy. Luke must learn to master his hidden past in order to overthrow the evil dictator who has gained control, before that dictator can blow up planets full of resistance fighters.

How does Luke end up on this quest? Well, a pair of robots stumble into his life without warning. One of those robots has a message that needs to be delivered to someone Luke thinks he knows, so Luke offers to help in this small way. Unfortunately, once he’s done so Luke returns to find his old life has been destroyed while he wasn’t looking, and the person he delivered the message to tells Luke that the only choice now is to leave the planet and go on this quest, which Luke accepts. In this case, there is an explicit quest-giver in this story, two in fact. R2-D2 gives Luke the initial quest, and then Obi Wan gives him the follow-up quest that carries through the rest of the story. Obviously there’s a number of other quests along the way, but those two first quests set the snowball rolling down the hill, and the rest happens as a consequence of momentum.

What makes the quest interesting once Luke is actively pursuing it? Well there’s quite a lot of discovery here, Luke doesn’t know anything at all about the Jedi until he’s told he is one. There’s a lot of hidden information about Luke’s past that he wasn’t aware of, and basically it turns out that Luke has all these connections to this story already and if he’s going to learn the truth about himself, he has to pursue the rest of this. While he’s pursuing this knowledge, the empire is pursuing him. The enemy army is out to destroy the resistance, and the information R2-D2 is carrying, as well as anyone helping. The setup here is similar to LotR in that an evil is pursuing the hero, but the difference is that Vader has many other things to do and only confronts Luke directly when their paths happen to cross. The rest of his time is spent planning the destruction of the resistance. If this were a game, Vader might be a wandering enemy that will gain aggro on the player as long as they’re within the same zone (or some large but arbitrary distance), but wouldn’t seek the player on his own.

The reward of Star Wars is pretty much just survival. Of course there’s a degree of notoriety as well, as Luke earns a few medals in his time, and gains a number of different powers over the course of the movies. But much like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars’ reward is just a return to normal life as best as is possible given the situation. The tangible rewards are mostly inconsequential.

Avatar The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender is a tv series that follows 12 year old Aang as he tries to develop his skills and maturity to a point where he can defeat the leader of an enemy army. The story setup is that in every generation there is an Avatar who can use all 4 elements at once (while everyone else only gets a single element), and when Aang finds out he is that avatar, the pressure gets to him and he runs away, ending up trapped in an iceberg for 100 years. Upon waking, he finds out that his absence allowed the Fire Nation to take over the world, and he is the only one who can stop their reign of terror. 

The quest here is given to Aang in a vision of a past life of his, where he is told by a spirit that Sozen’s Comet is coming once again, and will give the Fire Nation a temporary boost of power that will make them unstoppable. It’s up to Aang to complete this quest or else every nation will be overrun, and the world knocked out of balance. If this were a videogame, the quest would be a pretty explicit quest giver scenario preceded by a cutscene. This is one of the rare situations where I think the natural instinct of your average game designer is actually the correct choice for this story!

So what makes the quest interesting once Aang’s accepted it? Well he’s far too weak to reach the Fire Nation, much less kill their leader. He’s also morally unwilling to do said killing. Over the course of the show he has to come to terms with his role in society and all the implications of that role. Most of the episodes focus not on the training, but rather on the needs of the people and how the Avatar can and can’t help them. Most of the story is about expectations vs reality. Each episode is an exploration of the perceptions of different people, there are running themes of coming to see the world from others’ perspectives, and the dangers of getting mired in what you think is the right way of doing things. There are also armies and constant battles that happen within this, but the primary driver of the drama is the willingness, unwillingness, ability, or inability to see the world from each others’ view. Most of the fights are directly caused by these perceptions, and the resolution to them is almost never to fight, but only to subdue and teach. Even the final conflict is only combat until the enemy can be subdued and prevented from further violence. 

The reward here is once again a return to normalcy. Aang wakes up in a world he inadvertently ruined, and quests until he can bring it back to the way it was.

But enough with this epic nonsense, these are too easy! Let’s look at quest design in things that don’t even have straight forward quests! 

Knives Out

Knives Out is a whodunnit story following two characters equally. The perspective character of the film is Marta, a private nurse of the patron of an extremely wealthy family. Though she’s the perspective character we follow through the film, she’s not the protagonist, necessarily. That role belongs to Detective Blanc, who drives the plot forward through most of the film (trading off with Marta a few times). The plot of the film is that the patron has died, and Detective Blanc has been hired  to find who’s responsible, but he must do so while Marta tries to hide her involvement. It’s not really possible to objectively say that one of these characters is more important to the story than the other, so I won’t even try. That’s part of why I wanted to examine this movie anyway. 

So how do they get their quest? Well Marta wants to prevent anyone from finding out her involvement in the death of her patron, because she knows it would look like she killed him. She got her quest as a consequence of actions the night of the death of her patron, and she didn’t so much accept the quest as she was forced to carry it through to completion or else wind up in jail. Detective Blanc doesn’t even know what the quest is or why he’s been given it. He gets hired to solve a mystery, but only in the form of an envelope full of money and a newspaper clipping. He accepts the “quest” just because he’s so curious what is going on here.

What’s interesting once they’re already on the quest? Well the interest here comes in that Marta’s quest is to prevent Detective Blanc from completing his quest. Not in a direct way, this isn’t some deathmatch fight, that would be too simple. Her goal in this quest is to make Blanc believe he’s completed his quest, but to do so without exposing her role in the mystery. She spends the film foiling his attempts to solve the mystery in laughably ridiculous ways, as the universe seems to conspire to expose her. If this were a game it would be very similar to a game of mafia/werewolf (or Among Us, since that’s the new hotness right now), but with a much more intricate series of ways to expose each other’s guilt (imagine if the scene with the dog happened with a tiny alien walking up to the guilty astronaut in Among Us).

And the reward? Nothing. Nothing at all. There is no reward for this quest, Blanc was hired with cash up-front and Marta earns money over the course of the story, but not as a result of her quest (though there is a time where her money is tied to her completion of her quest, so maybe we could count that).

Beauty And The Beast

Beauty and the Beast is a Disney musical based on a fairy tale. A witch tries to seek shelter with a vain young man who refuses her entry due to her ugliness. She responds by cursing him to be a monster until he can find someone willing to love him. The story follows Belle as she is captured by the beast and eventually falls for him.

So how does she get the quest? Well… she doesn’t. The quest was given to Beast. Technically she does go on a quest of her own volition in the form of rescuing her dad, who she then trades for herself as captor, but that’s not really the main quest, and in this article thus far, we’ve been following just the primary quest of a story. So the beast got the quest, and he was given it in standard quest-giver fashion by someone who set him up with a situation to respond to, and he responded against that person’s preferences. Standard fairy-trickery sort of setup, except that it was ~5 years ago. So the movie actually follows someone other than the child of prophecy, as it were, as they help the failed hero to finally succeed before the time’s up. Belle never chooses to participate in this quest in the quest-giver fashion, she stumbles into the castle and gets trapped by its rules. Once there she promises not to leave, but it’s really up to her to stay. She leaves in the film, more than once, and chooses to come back. Something we don’t often allow players to do in this type of quest.

What makes the quest interesting once we’ve accepted it? Well it’s all intrapersonal relationship stuff as Beast and Belle slowly fall for each other. The quest is really just an excuse for these two to have to spend time together, which maybe isn’t something we map directly into a video game’s systems so much as just something we allow to exist. A quest with no purpose other than to get to know your teammates. What a concept!

The reward here is also in reverse. Belle’s actions complete Beast’s quest, and his reward is a return to normalcy, much like all the rest of these stories I’ve been looking at. Except, again, she isn’t the one getting that quest reward. She reaps the benefits, because she now loves the man, and a man he is once more, but still there’s no direct reward for our protagonist. If this were a game, maybe the player gets a new ally, but no direct reward themself. 

Tale of Princess Kaguya

Princess Kaguya follows the story of a young girl who is born into a bamboo reed that’s grown in a forest owned by a simple farmer couple. They raise the bamboo girl as their own, and as they do, a series of miracles happen that provide them with the means to take care of the girl as her family (gods who live on the moon), wish for her. 

So how do they get the quest? …..well there isn’t a quest…. A tale, in film speak, is a story told simply as a series of events that don’t follow your typical plot arcs. While Star Wars follows the Hero’s Journey very explicitly, Princess Kaguya needs no such structure. It’s merely a series of events in the life of a young woman whose story then resolves, and we’re left to consider why or if it meant anything at all. The parents get a bunch of money and sort of invent a quest for themselves, but it’s never something they need to follow and indeed they quit before ever completing it anyway. It could be said that Kaguya has a quest in her desire to come to earth for a visit, but if this were a video game the quest on your HUD would read “Go to earth” and would complete the moment the game started. 

What makes the quest interesting once they’re on it? Well I suppose the aforementioned miracles are interesting. They just keep getting random gifts from bamboo shoots in the forest, so that’s pretty exciting!

The reward here is a return to normalcy. This series of events happens in the lives of these people, and at the end their lives go back to the way they were, insofar as that’s possible after years of growth and personal development around each other. 

Easy A

Easy A is a romantic comedy film built on tropes from the 80s and intending to lampoon them while delivering a by-the-numbers film in its own right. In it, protagonist Olive must come to terms with her own self-confidence issues as they spiral out of control when she lies to a friend to get out of a boring weekend and keeps up the lie for the sake of appearing interesting.

So how does she get the quest? Well, she tells a lie and the plot sort of happens around her. The “quest” of the film is mostly at the end once she decides how to resolve the conflict of the film by hosting a live webcam show where she tells the story of what’s been happening, though there is a second quest in her need to realize her personal faults. Both of these come to her in the same way: she feels a certain way and acts on that feeling, her motivations are entirely internal. At the start of the film, her internal motivation is that she doesn’t want to hang out with her friend, and she wants to be exciting and popular in high school. At the end of the film, she wants to be rid of the notoriety and the only way out is by telling the truth. She simply decides to do both of those things, and the consequences of her actions play out naturally (if dramatically). If this were a game, there would be no quest giver, she would make a choice that leads to strong reactions from the people around her, and then she would decide that she wants to fix this situation. Another character might decide to roll with it permanently, or to immediately tell the truth and avoid the drama. 

Once she’s on the quest, what makes it interesting? Well the main interest in the film comes from the varied reactions people have once Olive tells her lie. Once she’s earned a particular reputation, people treat her very differently. For a time she decides to run with it because this is a reputation she enjoys, but once it all comes crashing down around her she decides to go back to the way things were. All the conflict in this story comes from interpersonal drama. If this were a game, we’d have to represent this by characters having altered dialogue based on a choice the player could make. As long as the player continues making that choice, the conflict escalates and changing their decision becomes increasingly difficult. The climax comes when the consequences start to interfere with the player’s core goal in some way. 

The reward for the quest is another return to normalcy. Once again becoming a normal teenager is plenty enough of a reward for this film, though of course there’s also the boy she picks up along the way because this is a rom com afterall. 

So that’s all the films I wanted to take a look at today. What did we learn from this examination?

Well, primarily I’ve learned that films and novels find people standing around handing out quests rather boring. Mysterious messages arriving through clandestine means are much more common. Sometimes you find someone who happens to need some help, but even if that’s how the quest starts it NEVER stays that way for long. Kill 10 rats is only ever the beginning of a series of events that snowball out of control wildly. 

What’s most interesting to me is the number of times that the quest derives from player choice. Easy A is entirely based on modeling out the NPC reactions to a seemingly inconsequential choice. Imagine if you were to allow a player to put on a mask, but that mask depicts an evil god. Maybe the player thinks the mask looks cool, or that the idea of flaunting the game’s religion is kind of subversive and fun. Once the player starts wearing the mask, the NPCs start to react to that mask. Over time, if the player keeps wearing it, the NPC reactions increase in intensity. Eventually wearing that mask starts to interfere with their other quests and gameplay. Now the player has to make a choice to take the thing off or double down on their mask wearing. This is how quite a few plots work in film, theatre, or novels, but we don’t often model this in games. Obviously it’s because doing so costs a lot of resources for something that may not be all that important, but I can imagine a smaller scale version of this could be implemented at the same level of effort as a normal quest in an open world game. 

Another point of interest, for me, are the spaces where there aren’t quests at all. Princess Kaguya is a whole story that just unfolds. This is basically what an emergent narrative looks like, if it had been recorded and set to film. These are just the choices a player makes in response to a game’s systems. Similarly, Beauty and the Beast is all reactive to someone else’s choices. An NPC that has a quest they can’t complete anymore, and is lost to despair. The player can swoop in and help to motivate them, but doing so comes at personal cost. And there’s no reward beyond helping that character complete a quest for themself. We see this sort of thing for helper NPCs in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, of course, but rarely do we bother doing it for side characters that aren’t direct teammates. I think this would be a really fun way to recruit a character, and we did see this sort of thing for rarer characters in older CRPGs. 

And the number one takeaway from all this, for me, is the lack of a quest giver. Quests in other media don’t come from people standing around in an open world, waiting to ask for help. Instead, they exist all around us as we go about our day. If we’re doing quest givers, they should be NPCs yelling for help in the streets as you pass by, ideally with animations to reach out to you as you come close. But beyond that we should get quests as a consequence of our other actions. Game Devs often don’t trust their core mechanics to hold interest (often because their core mechanics just aren’t that interesting on their own). I imagine the ideal scenario for open world quest design is that you walk into a new region and you see a city in the distance. When you get to the city, you find lots of jobs posted on job boards available to you at any time. Let’s say you see a posting to help clear some rats off Farmer MacReedy’s corn field. Kill 10 dire rats, no problem! So you head off to do that, but when you kill the third rat, it drops a magic ring. What on earth is a rat doing holding a magic ring, you ask? So you pick it up and put it into your inventory when suddenly you’re surrounded by ghosts! You can’t even see the corn field anymore for the ghosts, so you throw the ring to the ground and are cured. This destroys the ring, since it’s an MMO or other open world game, but you wonder still. When the seventh rat then drops a similar ring, you stare at it for a moment before picking it up. This time you accept the call, fighting through the ghost blindness to reach the town and ask the local church for help. This starts you down a path that leads you on an epic adventure to kill a necromancer and save both the farm, and the whole city!

And I acknowledge that players aren’t going to enjoy being blinded, and a number of other concessions that should be acknowledged in my example, I’ve not put it into full production, but surely you can imagine a few tweaks to the standard formula that could give us a ton of variety at very little cost. Quests that begin on picking up an item don’t really need more resources to create, since you already have quests, items, and an inventory. Ghost blindness may not work for you, but maybe you start shooting fire from your face or something. Your game definitely has systems that can be used here, even if you’re a turn-based game no more complex than the original Final Fantasy. 

Imagine a world where you’re a wizard learning your level 15 skills and you find a book of dark magics somewhere. You see this really amazing spell in there, so you learn it, but once you do you become marked by the Wizard Council who demands you burn that book and never use that spell again. Technically this isn’t more complex than any Dragon Age quest, but it’s going to stick with you a lot longer because it came directly from a choice you made, and one you weren’t making in the context of a quest.

All player choices can create consequences. Some of those consequences can be “quests”, either immediately or revealed over the course of time. There’s quite a lot of research on player expression, autonomy, etc. and there’s a whole field of study into self determination theory, all of which basically says “I like it when things respond to my choices”.

I believe there’s a broad range of untapped potential in games to offer responses to player choice. I also believe that most of that can be done without any additional workload or at any greater cost of resources than we already expend on less engaging options. By looking into the way other media approaches its stories and quests, I believe we can learn to improve our medium and bring games into the future. 

To this end, keep an eye on this blog as I’ll be going much harder into this quest design research over the coming months. 

And as always, thanks for reading!

Narrascope 2020: Beyond Time

This year I gave my very first talk at Narrascope! It's a summary of the last several blog posts I've made, discussing the idea of nonlinear storytelling and pacing structures and can be found here:

Thanks for watching!

A Condemnation of Time

Time. What even is it? 

This idea has been at the crux of much of my research for the past few years: Telling a story to a player is a linear act, but allowing the player to control the main character forces nonlinearity into the equation. And yet at the end of the day, all narrative is linear.

To reconcile these competing ideas, I wrote a couple of different articles recently. One was about nonlinear story structure and the other was about applying that to the world map of your game. These two articles discuss a concept of structuring your story by section rather than by specific time. This is a concept that’s been floating around in my head for some time, but which crystallized a few weeks ago when I finally sat down with Outer Wilds.

(Spoilers for the general ideas and construction of Outer Wilds later in this article. I won’t talk details, I promise). 

Outer Wilds is a game about exploring an area during a specific amount of time. You explore and get reset back to the beginning and start exploring all over again. What I found fascinating about the game is that because everything resets, they designed the game around player knowledge. As you play, you learn, and beating the game is just a matter of learning the right things. You can open the game for the first time and beat it immediately, if you know what to do.

This style of design strongly reminded me of the campfires concept I mentioned in the first of my two articles. Realizing that cascaded this knowledge through the second article, and made me ask a question:

What is the purpose of time?

In a film, you must design around time because seconds matter. Your audience is sitting in a theatre for a short time, and your goal in a film is to tell the best story in the most efficient way. Now… when was the last time you’ve played a game that lasts for exactly one hour and thirty minutes, regardless of who is playing? 

As far as I know, such a game doesn’t exist. I believe that’s because we all understand that the interactive nature of games divorces games from the concept of linear time. Not to say that time cannot be used in games, but rather that on some level we all acknowledge that games should not be beholden to time in the way of other media. This belief in hand, I took a closer look at games that DO use linear time to great effect.

Consider the recent PS4 game, Control. The Ashtray Maze is a strictly linear experience, and man! That section was such a rush! But my experience with that very section brings to light the problem with time. You see, I died at the end of the Ashtray Maze. I screwed up and got killed by a particularly nasty enemy at the end of it. Unfortunately, this section is strictly linear, so in dying I broke the pacing, and by the time I had run through it again and reached its conclusion the magic had all gone. Imagine, if you will, watching a film for the very first time and you hit the climax and it’s a HUGE scene with explosions and shiny lights and whatever sorts of bombast you find the best and most entertaining. Now imagine that the moment that scene reaches its apex, you sit on your remote control and it skips back to the beginning of the scene and there’s no button to skip ahead. That’s what happened to me in Control. 

Now, I love Control. I do. I think it’s Game Of The Year material. The design crew behind that game is INCREDIBLE. The quality of that game just lends all the more strength to my assertion here that time, as a concept, is busted. Because in the example of my unfortunate death, what could the designers even have done differently? (Seriously. I'm asking. Feel free to comment below, just finish reading first, please)

So if not time, then…. What?

Well, that’s where Outer Wilds comes in.

Despite being ABOUT time, Outer Wilds is not designed around time in its interactions. There’s no section where you listen to someone talk for a minute and a half, or wander through tunnels for three minutes and forty seconds. They could have easily done this sort of thing, they certainly come very close to it with some of their puzzles, but the worlds you explore are instead designed around rules. The best example of this rule-defined playing space is an area that is only available at a specific part of its orbit. Effectively, it’s a door that’s only open at a specific time, and thus a clear example against my point here, except that it doesn’t actually matter when you go to this area, as long as it’s while the door is open. At no point are you forced into a specific sequence. Three minutes and forty two seconds into your playthrough of Outer Wilds you can be at any number of locations, doing any number of things. That’s the distinction I’m trying to make here: Time is one element of a system, it’s one rule you can use, but in making a game you are inherently breaking from time as a design constraint. If your player wants, they can stand outside in the rain for four straight hours and there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that (unless you put a timer on the game, of course, but that just breaks in other ways).

Ok, now let’s create an example story. There is a door in your game. Let’s say that this door can only be opened by a particular word of power that has been locked away for eons and it is up to the prophesied hero to find this word and reveal the ancient secrets. 

In a film, you control the specific events leading up to the moment this door is unlocked. In Act One the hero discovers their quest and sets off on an adventure meeting lots of quirky characters along the way. In Act Two the hero meets Tim The Enchanter who controls the beasts of the great forest and uses dark magic to stand in the hero’s way. Tim forces the beasts to chase the hero who jumps into a cave only to find that the other end of the cave leads to an underground river and lo and behold, on the other end of that river there is a hidden door that unlocks with the poem the hero’s grandmother read them as a child! What a coincidence! Each scene of this film gives us a bit of information that hopefully sets the stage for the later events in the story. The hero reaches the door only after every necessary piece of information has been conveyed to the audience. If the film is done well, this moment happens exactly as the final piece is conveyed. 

In a game, however, the structure is a bit different. You can’t really know how long it’s going to take the player to meet all those quirky characters in Act One, and you certainly can’t know how long it’ll take them to find the hidden underground cave, or even if they'll find it at all. In most modern video games what we do is to emulate film. You put the door in a cave and the cave is at the end of a forest path, and it's all just a long line cleverly hidden. It’s a bit like riding a roller coaster, and the designer just tries to make sure that the monsters jump out at exactly the right moment. By limiting the possibility space around your players’ choices, you regain control and you can make that linear corridor extremely compelling. You end up with something very much like the Ashtray Maze.

In Outer Wilds, you instead take the independent elements of this story and put them in an open space. You make a world full of quirky characters and you assume the player will surely meet some of them. In our magic door example, you make a dark forest within which evil creatures roam. You make an underground river at the end of which is the ancient door. You make all of this and then you point arrows to draw attention to it. You give the quirky characters voice lines that suggest a hidden river beneath the forest. You create evil beasts that chase the character towards the cave’s entrance any time they chase the character at all. You make the cave more interesting than anything else around it and you subtly design the terrain to emphasize the cave. If all else fails, you give the player a spell that tracks a mysterious magical power directly to the underground cave, but by whatever means you can, you get them to that cave. At no point, however, do you take control away from them. At no point do you force them down a linear forest path. At no point do you succumb to time’s influence because you know that to do that is to give up what makes interactive narrative unique. 

Now you may see exactly why this methodology hasn’t been immediately adopted by the entire games industry. Linear stories are much easier to tell and we understand the rules there. So let’s define some of the new rules we need, shall we?

At this point I’d like to revisit my pizza graph, but we need some pieces, and one additional concept, first. Conveniently enough, Outer Wilds has prepared all of its pieces for me in an easy-to-read package deal!

Notice the groupings, each topic of research in the game is given a color and each of the clues about that topic are grouped together. You can find them in all sorts of orders, some of them require others be found first, but most are freely available as long as you go to the right place. The last relevant concept for this article, is the idea of throughlines. The idea, in short, is that there are multiple throughlines that shape any given story. You learn about what’s happening to the character, you learn about their relationships, you learn about the world around them, and you learn about how all of this affects the world as a whole.

The story of a film is built around these throughlines. You can read a thorough breakdown of this concept here if you need a deeper understanding. I bring up throughlines, because Outer Wilds’ plot threads here are loosely analogous to the concept. Your goal in Outer Wilds is to explore the mystery of four seemingly disparate objects that turn out to all be related, in much the same way as it’s revealed that a Pixar film’s characters are all reflections or comments on some aspect of the journey the protagonist is undertaking. 

Imagine, if you will, this same structure applied to characters. In Finding Nemo, Marlin meets the forgetful, lonely Dory, a cool turtle named Crush, a hungry shark named Bruce, and a number of other characters. If we were designing an open-world video game version of that film, you can imagine how this exploration-based model could be used to allow the protagonist to get to know the side characters in a free form way. You can also, hopefully, imagine how this same structure applies to story beats in general. 

Outer Wilds allows you to discover specific objects, but you could just as easily map concepts to this same style of graph. The important thing is that the game shows how to do this nonlinearly. We can explore the planets freely and you can run into each element at your own pace. If this were Finding Nemo, each character might come with a set of traits you discover. We could have a moment where we find out Dory is forgetful, another moment where we find out how determined she is to find her family, another about how lonely she is, and another about how much she wants to just be accepted. We would make a larger number of these beats than the film might use, and we scatter them across the regions of our game, allowing players to come across them naturally. Much like in Outer Wilds, the trick to this strategy is to have a target for each of these plot points. As in the throughlines concept, all of these optional story beats must reinforce the central plot. Dory's character traits don't matter unless they're compared to Marlin, and the cannon we see in Outer Wilds means nothing unless we learn what it was pointed to and why.

So once again I return to my question: what is the purpose of linear time in storytelling? It exists as a by-product of the media everywhere but Interactive Fiction, but what benefit does it give those mediums? Well, it lets you control the flow of information. Time serves as a lock to keep us from learning certain things until we're ready for them. Pacing is making sure that people get information only when they need that information. So if time is a lock, then pacing is a key. If only games had some concept of charting locks and keys to keep players confined to a specific section in an open world.

Mark Brown has done us a huge favor with his explorative video series, Boss Keys. In it, he charts the nonlinear progression of exploration games like Zelda and Metroid. His charts show everything you have access to at a specific time horizontally, and then you open up vertical rows as you find keys. 

Outer Wilds works very much like a Metroidvania, but instead of unlocking new abilities, you unlock new information, each new piece of information letting you think and predict and theorize about where to go next. What that means for us here is that we can use the Mark Brown chart to plot each beat found in Outer Wilds, and keep in mind the comparison to narrative throughlines as you read these next few graphics. 

Now, I want to clarify immediately is that I’m not concerned with making a chart that’s accurate to the game (I think you can probably bypass every one of these locks if you’re lucky enough). What I'm using this graph to show is simply that you can make this graph at all. Even if the locks and keys in this chart aren’t 100% solid, and you can sequence break any of them if you get lucky, or are just particularly clever, the chart here still demonstrates the design intention. The designers made a game where you start off with a huge open field of information, and that information allows you to progress through to some information that is quite hard to access without the information that comes before it. 

All of this finally brings us back to the pizza graph. The elements we've charted to Mark Brown's graph all adapt here 1:1, because what is Act One other than a lock needing a key? The story leads us slowly through the act and once we've got enough information to continue with the story, we'll find the key and unlock that door and progress down our vertical graph into a new space exactly the same as if that key were an upgrade in a metroidvania (and hey, maybe it is).

“Act One” is the section where you don’t know anything, and you wander the solar system at random collecting clues. The first “Gate” is the moment you find one of the keys that unlocks some of the information you need to get further into the game. “Act Two” is the part of the game where you’re actively tracking down specific information, chasing down leads, sure that if you go where the last clue suggested you’ll find the next piece of important information. The second “Gate” is when you’ve solved all of the game’s puzzles and you’ve realized what you must do next. “Act Three” is the part of the game after the game stops recording your progress, which is why it’s an empty band of red on this image. This is the climax of the game as you experience a sequence of linear storytelling that leads you to the final conclusion and eventually the credits. (I'll link the pizza graph article, just in case anyone's confused)

This entire concept is mapped to a world map in my region-based narrative article as well. 

Now that we have our plot points all charted out by act or section or any other metric we find to be useful for our production, we can overlay this whole thing on top of a world map. In the case of Outer Wilds, I probably wouldn't bother doing this for the solar system as a whole, but charting each planet in this way might be useful. However, since those planets are 3D, I'm gunna pass on doing that for this article. Instead, let's take that Outer Wilds pizza graph we just made and pop it over the top of a 2D world map just as an example.

In this example I’ve pretty arbitrarily chosen placement because I don’t actually have a game I’m trying to make. Read the aforementioned article for the nuance, but for now suffice to say that you can plot out various events that can happen when you enter the area surrounding each dot on this map. In this particular representation, the whole map is “Act One” from the previous graphic. Within that are specific regions for all of the “Act Two” elements, and a larger region for “Act Three”. This would play, in-game, like an open world with more linear spaces like you might find in the caves of Ash Twin, or like a Dark Souls region, or a Zelda dungeon, or even like the linear sections of Control, if you really must ignore all my preaching.

Realistically, if I were trying to recreate Outer Wilds in a 2D map like this, there wouldn’t be any orange regions at all. There’d only be a big, open map and the big locked off section on the top left, and maybe each individual “Act Two” dot would have an orange ring around it to denote that it was locked away in a miniature dungeon of its own. But that doesn’t read as cleanly from a distance, so I decided to spare you the confusion until you got to this part of this paragraph and now I’ve confused you all over again. You’re welcome. 

An open world game with more linear sequences naturally builds pacing into the fabric of the game. Moving between open and linear narrative forms gives players a nice gameplay contrast to keep them hooked, and it allows you to control the locks and keys the player needs to progress. All of this is done without ever needing to do a time-based corridor with a specific sequence of events. By following this concept, you free your game from the shackles of time and move us all towards a bright and brilliant future where games don’t need to disrupt gameplay just to tell you how sad your middle-aged white protagonist is doing today. 

That’s it for this article. I hope this concept is clearly communicated, but if you have questions or comments feel free to leave them below. And if you find this technique useful, I'd love to see what you do with it in your own games. 

Thanks for reading!

Area-Focused Narrative

In my last article, I described the three act structure in video games by tearing out the linearity of the classic structure and including another dimension to it, reflecting the players’ ability to choose and approach game moments in any way they like. 

In this article I’m going to look at each “Act” and how that pizza chart format can be used to chart the individual elements within, allowing greater flexibility to design regardless of your overall structure. 

When we look at a Metroidvania title, we see an open world to progress through and at various points in our linear progression we see abilities that allow us to move through the world in a new way, giving us access to more of the map. 

A Zelda title is much the same, except that we are given access to most of the world from the start, and what we unlock is the ability to go into specific spaces called “dungeons” that offer a more curated experience. 

Holistically, Metroid and Zelda pacing structures are the same, you have an open possibility space that you explore until you are blocked, and then you search for a new ability to unblock yourself. The story in these games uses each dungeon as a narrative note, and the time before and after that dungeon act as the lead up to and the transition between those beats, preparing or expanding on story moments with NPC comments, environmental changes, etc. Each game will use the open space differently, so let’s look at an example:

This is Link’s Awakening. Each dungeon is housed in an area that you gain access to by completing subsequent dungeons. As you explore, you unlock more and more of the world, and find more dungeons. What we also see in this chart is a demonstration of pacing, in that the area associated with Dungeon 1 is just the starting village and a small area south of that. Dungeon 2 expands that slightly, but mostly reinforces our knowledge of the same space we learned in the first section. Dungeon 3, however, is a huge expansion, giving us access to roughly half the remaining map. Dungeons 4 and 5 have us exploring that massive open space, and increasing its size even more. Dungeons 6, 7, and 8 all isolate us into much smaller areas of the game, acknowledging that by now we’ve explored and are ready to spend more time in the now-much-longer dungeon areas. What happens in these open world spaces varies from dungeon to dungeon, most of the earlier ones simply let you explore spaces and talk to the people who live there, while later dungeons tend to have you go to a specific place to reveal some hidden treasure that had been under your nose all along. 

So to map an example of this onto that pizza chart I mentioned last time, here’s the lead up into the first dungeon:

Link’s Awakening is a very linear game as a whole, so there’s not a lot of open exploration in its collectibles (though it does offer quite a number of side objectives you can do in any order, and plenty of time/incentive to explore). However, imagine if you could get the sword at any time in this sequence. Imagine also, if the Toadstool, Magic Powder, and Tarin quests were all unrelated to each other and you could tackle them in any order; or if the Key could be obtained at any time after you had done those prerequisite tasks. This entire area before Dungeon 1 is a miniature open world game, a microcosm of the game as a whole. In this case that microcosm is as linear as the game as a whole, but we see a loosening of the reins in more modern titles. Breath of the Wild was a great crystallization of this concept, even if its dungeons weren’t quite as narratively developed as those in Link’s Awakening.

This structure exists well outside the Zelda formula as well. In Super Metroid, Norfair acts as a specific story moment in its entirety. The world around you has become dangerous and full of fire and that conveys a strong sense of tone. The Ghost Ship acts as a strong, linear experience almost like a Zelda dungeon. Maridia is full of water and walls that must be blasted open, which provides us with a particular feeling as we explore, and is home to the first Metroids we see in this game. While Super Metroid is light on story, you get a solid feeling for each area, because the tone is presented as you play, and the narrative information you need to know is simply present in the world you explore, or forced in front of you in the form of a boss. If you wanted, you could even include more specific ‘dungeon’ sequences in a Metroidvania game, highlighting more specific narrative moments with a space catered to telling that story.

Now that we’ve discussed some examples, let’s break down what defines this structure. 

I’d say the core is an “overworld” with a general theme. In my previous article I defined this as an Act, but here I’ve broken that down into just a story beat. Either approach is valid, and you can easily chart both, having a structure laid out for the entire Act One, and then having a sub chart within that to define the story surrounding the first few dungeons that happen during that act. As an example, let’s say you’re making a fantasy game, and everything that happens in the first hour of the game is about the Evil Lord Sorkk’naal, King of All Orcs, planning an invasion of the nearby kingdom. The kingdom you start in, and any spaces you travel through around that kingdom, will all be talking about that invasion, it’s the most important thing happening right now. Even if you leave the kingdom where this is happening, all quests ideally reinforce the theme of the orc invasion, or give us a new perspective on it. If we know the physical space we have access to, we’re able to control where and how the story is told. This could also include something like a hub world. Mario 64 isolates its levels from the overworld, but there are characters throughout the hub world who convey information as you progress, and the castle subtly changes as you come to open new doors and find new spaces. I use the example of Mario 64 here, because even non-narrative games can adapt this structure to keep the world feeling coherent even if a full story isn’t really the point. 

After you define the overworld, now define the linear “dungeons” that expand on specific concepts. These “dungeons” could be literal areas that you explore that are specifically about a particular idea, or they could just be quests that you go on which help to expand this aspect of the story. Control gives us a quest that leads us to a specific area for a specific purpose and as we approach that area we get a reinforcement of the area’s events, be that sentient mold or piles of clocks. You are always given the quest when you’re somewhere else, giving you motivation to explore for a while before you go to the linear sequence. By the time you reach the linear quest moment, you’ve been prepared, and you’re ready for linear curation. Control has a few discrete “dungeons” throughout the game, where you’ll go down a particular hallway and reality will bend and leave you in an isolated space full of puzzles or battles, but most of its story happens in spaces that start off as linear sequences and eventually just become spaces you travel through in metroidvania fashion. The concept of “dungeons” is less about an isolated space away from the regular gameplay, and more about the linear, curated sequence that’s paced very specifically. 

No, really. Control does SUCH an amazing job of this. Go play it if you haven’t.

Ok, you say, that’s all great and everything, but how do I use this structure in a production? Well, I’m glad you asked. Start by breaking your story into chunks. Most people will have an Act One, Act Two, Act Three, and that’s a solid place to start. Have a specific narrative purpose to each of those. Act One: “The orc army is attacking”. Act Two “The army has attacked and now we must fight back”. Act Three: “We’ve won, but at what cost”. Once those over-arching elements are defined, carry them down into the smaller elements within them. Any quest in Act One should be all about the impending attack. Maybe you scout for information, maybe you sabotage them, maybe you convert some of their troops to your side or negotiate for peace. Whatever happens within a story sequence should mirror the overall theme of that sequence. When it’s time to move onto the next Act, discard the quests from Act One. Do this by making it obvious that you can’t go back, once the orc army has attacked, there’s no point in scouting anymore, right? But you can have quests that span multiple acts, Mrs Poppowitz’s pet cat needs to be saved, and it doesn’t matter if the orcs have attacked or not, the poor thing is still just going to be stuck up in that tree. These sorts of quests don’t need to relate to the specific themes of an act, but should certainly expand the story as a whole or serve some functional purpose (fun is a valid purpose, btw). As long as most of what a player experiences in the game pushes the story forward, having a sprinkle of world-building quests available will rarely be a bad thing for your players.

So the key takeaways:

• Define the ‘overworld’ where your story beat is happening.
• Fill that ‘overworld’ with things that move its specific story forward.
• Use neighboring spaces as transitions from beat to beat.
• Break up the ‘overworld’ with specific, curated ‘dungeon’ sequences.

And that’s that! Hopefully this has in some way illuminated a dark corner of your mind. If not, I apologize and will try to do better next time. Until then, thanks for reading!

Nonlinear Story Structure in Games

To interact is to have choices, but so much of our storytelling in games prevents choice. How do we tell the story of Joel, zombie survivor, without robbing players of their agency? Yet if they can choose to do anything at any time, how can we expect them to experience someone else’s story and not just create a new one of your own? Should we just let all games be story-generators like Minecraft? These questions have inspired several years of research on my part, and in this article I’m going to be discussing a narrative structure I have observed that helps to get closer to the answer.

In this article I’m going to take a look at conventional wisdom accepted in other media, and adapt that knowledge to games. I’m going to use examples from a few different games, and I’m going to invent a quick story to use as an example of my observed structure.

Part 1. What Is Choice? 

Choice is basically this diagram. You start off at A, and you can then move to B, C, or D. This is the foundation of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and most interactive narrative. You can use this structure with any number of choices, so long as it’s greater than one. The result of this choice can then become the start of a new choice, on and on into forever. This is called Branching Narrative.

One of the common structures we see in interactive fiction is the ‘diamond’. It’s when two branches split and then come back together. This is usually a structure that we see when a choice has no real consequence. So you start at A and then you choose B, C, or D, but no matter which choice you’ve made you always end up back at E.

Generally, this structure is frustrating for players. It’s the illusion of choice, but it’s something that’s far easier to manage in a production setting, so it’s kind of where we end up much of the time, simply due to ease of production.

Part 2. The Three Act Structure

With those structures in mind, I want to go off on a tangent and discuss the idea of the 3 Act Structure. I’ll offer a link here for anyone unfamiliar. Each act in the 3 act structure serves a specific purpose. Act 1 sets everything up, Act 2 develops everything, Act 3 resolves everything. Within each of those acts are a number of events. Those events will convey what happens in the story. Some stories will present their events in reverse, while others may change the layout of the acts. Some stories simply don’t adhere to the 3 Act Structure and instead follow the Shakespearean default of the 5 Act Structure, which you can read about here. For the purposes of this article, all approaches are equally valid, so long as each act contains a sequence of information-rich events.

Here is a visual example of the 3 Act Structure. Pretty standard stuff, aside from some of my labelling, which I’ll get in to later. The takeaway here is that the story has a beginning, middle, and end and within each of those are a series of events. Now, keep all that in mind as I go off on one more tangent. Bear with me.

Part 3. Campfires In The Dark

A few years ago I heard this concept at a GDC talk (which I would link, but I can’t find it. If you know it, please link me) which referred to storytelling in games as campfires in the night. The concept is that your game is a dark forest. Everything is black and murky and you can’t tell where a player will be at any given time, but you’ve specifically lit a number of campfires to help you see. Because you know where those campfires are, you can interact with them and reasonably expect people to see whatever you do there, as they are attracted to the light. In other words, while you can’t know where a player will be at a given time, you can create cities out in the wastes, quest giving NPCs, environmental story moments, or any number of other elements. Knowing that these elements exist, and will attract the attention of the player, you can use them as framework to build your story. If you would like, I was able to find an article that summarizes the concept, which you can read here.

Part 4. Tying It Together

An excellent example of this campfire narrative concept is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You start off on a plateau, but once you complete this beginning sequence, you’re given free reign of the world. Out in the world you find a series of memories located in various points of interest (‘campfires’), each of which gives you a new piece of the overarching story. Once you’ve visited all the ‘campfires’, you can visit the castle and begin an ending sequence that wraps up the rest of the game. In Breath of the Wild, you start off in a single, limited space before being given a series of choices. Once you’ve made those choices, you are funneled back into a single, limited space.

Hey wait, that’s that choice chart from the beginning of this sprawling diatribe of an article.

In Breath of the Wild, however, those middle choices aren’t multiple choice answers on a test, you can pick any or all of them. In fact, the game is setup with an expectation that you will do exactly that. By allowing you to choose all of these options, you no longer feel like your autonomy has been robbed from you when you are forced to choose E at the end. Instead, the “B, C, and D” choice becomes a free-form section where you can do whatever you like. This contrasts nicely with A and E, allowing those two sections to convey the linear story information, while B, C, and D give you non-linear pieces of the puzzle. Each of these sections now becomes its own unique part of the overall structure. A introduces the world, B,C, and D expand on that narrative, and E closes out the narrative. Wait a second, that’s that OTHER chart from earlier in the article, isn’t it?

A now becomes Act 1, then you pass through the first Gate to B, C, and D in Act 2. Then on to E, which is Act 3.

Part 5. Pizza Break

The introductory plateau of Breath of the Wild serves as the game’s first act, teaching you the mechanics and introducing the world and characters. Act 2 lets go of the reigns, allowing you to freely explore as you see fit. At any time you can choose to go to the Castle, which funnels you into a linear space that allows the game to control the intensity of your experience, and therefore ramp up into a climax.

All of this still basically follows the 3 Act Structure chart I’ve given above, but the addition of choice into Act 2 changes things. Given that all the individual ‘Events’ listed in the chart don’t really need to be in any kind of order, why not find a new way to represent this information?

I give you the ever-elegant narrative pizza diagram. You start off in a discretely linear area, open up into a world full of options, and then funnel back into a discretely linear area to wrap everything up. It works quite well!

But what happens if you need more than one Castle and more than one Plateau? What if your story isn’t just one big open space book-ended by linear spaces? Think about your average open world, usually there’s a back and forth in and out of linear spaces.

So here’s our graduated pizza chart. Each Larger circle represents an act, within which are various events (aka “campfires”). Each larger circle could have as many “campfires” as you like, and can be split into sub circles as you see fit (much as Act 2 is usually split in the 3 Act Structure chart). The campfires represent optional information. You can sit at these campfires, soak them in for a while, but you’re free to go at any time. Gates are non-optional. Gates are the critical information your story needs to make sense. Gates are also the critical events of your story, the events that change the world. Each act of a story asks a narrative question, and while campfires help you answer those questions, the gates change what’s being asked. Once you pass through a gate you can’t go back, just as you can no longer quest for an answer you already know.

Part 6. Let’s Write A Story

Here we’ll write up a quick concept and fill out this generic chart with specifics.

Let’s say we have a kingdom in peril because it’s just lost its prince to the evil dragon who lives nearby. A brave knight has to go off to rescue the fop of a prince. The story starts with the brave knight as she deals with family troubles. We setup the conflict between her and her parents, we show how desperately she wants to go off on an adventure and prove herself. Then she discovers that OH NO! The prince has been stolen away! This is her chance, she must go! As she’s on the road she discovers an army preparing to go to war against the dragon to save the prince, but they can’t figure out how to take down the beast! If only someone could find a way! So our hero goes off and talks to a bunch of people who each know a little about slaying dragons, and she hears rumors of a magic ring, but it’s held in the treasure trove of the very dragon we’re trying to slay! An army would never make it out alive if they approached, the only way to get the ring is for one brave soul to sneak in under cover of darkness! Our hero approaches the dragon horde, but she discovers something more than the ring. The prince is being held in perfect comfort, and the dragon is gentle beast who is trying to stabilize the kingdom by keeping the fop of a prince from rising to the throne! He’s not such a bad beasty after all! But oh no! The army is still massing at the base of the mountain, preparing to strike. The attack launches in just three days! There must be some way to prevent this, some way to defend against them without killing her own people in the process! Oh, what a quandary! In the end our hero must figure what sort of knight she wants to be and find a way out of this mess! She decides to talk to the army, but that will never work as it is now, so she first sneaks into camp and kidnaps the general of the army. She uses the chaos as her moment, gathering those who will listen to her story about a peaceful dragon who wants nothing more than happiness for the kingdom. The army fractures, half of their blood is up and they want a fight, the other half knows the prince is an idiot and is willing to take any excuse to find a new leader. Without leadership, the army dissolves into factions and splinters against itself. Too busy to coordinate an assault against a massive dragon, the army retreats for now, long enough to begin diplomatic relations between the king and the dragon properly. The day is saved.

So let’s take a look at that mapped to our Breath of the Wild pizza graph

The intro establishes our hero. We see a cutscene, or whatever, to establish who we are and what we’re doing. Then it’s off and into the city for a little free range gameplay.

During this section we want to establish rumors of a dragon nearby, that the prince is missing, how the kingdom is responding to all of this, and how all of this is affecting our family life. All of this information sets the tone, but none of it is actually essential. What IS essential knowledge, however, is the first dragon sighting and a confirmation that the prince has been stolen. So while the campfire events help sell the story, the first Gate sets the stakes. No going back from there.

Act 2 is all about the enemy. In the first half, the dragon is the enemy. All your optional quests are about how to slay a giant dragon and earn glory for your kingdom, or how to make it on your own in the wilds. At some point you’ll move towards the dragon’s lair, and it’s time to hear about the ring that kills dragons. You’ll try to claim the ring and end up claiming the knowledge that things are not what they seem. This new knowledge changes the very foundation of your being, and changes the answer to the “who is the enemy” question. You’re against your own army!

Now your quests become about seeing the world for what it really is. You learn about dragons, you find out that man is the true monster after all, etc. etc. etc. Also in Act 2 I put a quest about the state of the kingdom, because it’d probably be nice to get a general status update from back home at some point during all this, but that quest can be done regardless of what you’re doing in the rest of Act 2. Just a little bonus info if you want it, ya know? But at some point your exploration and your questioning must come to an end and you must hear the proclamation: The army attacks in 3 days. OH NO!

Act 3 is then about who we want to be as a hero. Do we want to fight our own people? How can we protect the dragon? Does our army have a weakness we can exploit? There has to be some way to talk to them. Then you get the brilliant idea to kidnap the general and use the confusion to speak to the army at large, without a unified front they’ll be weaker. And so you move from Act 3 into the resolution, which wraps up the game as a whole. Roll credits!

Obviously, this story is super loose and awful, but hopefully you can get the idea of how this structure works in a more linear game.

Part 7. ...And In Conclusion

This structure is loosely present in nearly every interactive game I’ve studied. I didn’t first see this in an open world adventure, like the one I describe in part 6, but rather in a roguelike. Games like Dead Cells and Spelunky will progress from a single space where you shop or upgrade skills, and then out into an open world section. That open world section will be home to new information about the story/world, but you’ll always then move into another linear section. This pattern of expand and contract is prevalent all throughout roguelikes, and while it won’t often be acts of a story, the larger circles on my chart map directly to the levels in these games. Building a story for these games would be relatively simple.

Even linear games can be charted to this graph, they just chart as a series of gates and sub gates one after another. The less linear a game, the more campfires you find floating in the act circles until you get to the Breath of the Wild example.

This whole thing just functions as an added dimension to the 3 Act Structure, making it very easy to adapt to any production. I’ve personally used this on a number of prototypes that have never actually seen the light of day (getting a team to ship something with no money is hard, yo), but my career is still in development, so hopefully you can apply it to your own work. I’d love to hear about it if you do.

And for now, that’s all I’ve got. Hopefully you found something useful here. If you disagree with any of my assertions, or think I’m a fool for not going far enough with some aspect of this whole thing, let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!