Category: plot and narrative structure

Blogs of the Round Table: Denouement

Blogs of the Round Table is a group that writes on various game design issues, each month working from a new prompt provided by Corvus Elrod. This month the prompt is on a topic that’s come up several times for me, and that I’m thinking about again as I rework the ending of my WIP:

How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions…

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

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Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case

Manu Sharma, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta, and Ashwin Ram are publishing some research into drama management using a simplified version of Anchorhead (with a choose-your-own-adventure interface rather than a text parser).

The full paper is worth a read (though fairly technical), but the gist is that they proceeded by taking a series of cases from players, determining which players liked which subplots. They then designed a drama manager that would compare the current player’s behavior against its cases, determine which subplots this player was likely to be most interested in, and hint the player in the direction of those subplots. The result appears to be a better experience especially for non-gamers, though some players (especially the more experienced ones) disliked being over-hinted in the direction of things they would enjoy.

When no confident predictions can be made from player predictions, the drama management model falls back on author-defined rules about what to present when.

I have a bunch of minor quibbles with particulars of the study, but found the conclusions intriguing.

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Make It Good, After

So I finished! Won! Yay!

(No, you don’t understand. That was REALLY HARD. I don’t remember the last time I was playing a game with this degree of obsessive absorption… “Blue Lacuna” was also absorbing but in a different way, as I spent a lot of time kind of floating pleasantly around and/or inactively stuck. Here I spent a lot of time actively stuck, trying and retrying solutions…)

Anyway, some only-very-mildly spoilery remarks after the cut.

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