Introduction to Game
Storytelling
(Week 1B)
What is Story?
Dr. Michael Lynch
Slide set originally by Dr. Maurice Suckling
(Some materials courtesy of Evan Skolnick)
Preliminaries
Please close your laptop.
Please put away your cell phone.
WHAT IS STORY?
Definitions?
Story is…
One Word:
____________
C___________
CONFLICT
Definition of Conflict?
Someone wants, or needs something, but
someone or something stands in their way.
You can think of your story as a car.
But it’s going nowhere without fuel.
And the fuel of a story is conflict.
And how do you make fuel?
CHARACTERS
But we’ll come back to them.
Plot versus Character
- “Without action a tragedy [story] cannot exist, but without characters it may.” Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
The Scope of Conflict
How big should the conflict be?
The Scope of Conflict
It should FEEL HUGE to the
characters at the center of it.
Protagoras (490-420 BCE): “Man is the
measure of all things.”
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #1:
It’s possible to summarize the structure of every story in just four words:
___________________________________
_______________________________
_______________________________
_______________________________
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #1 :
It’s possible to summarize the structure of every story in just four words:
MOTIVATION
_______________________________
_______________________________
_______________________________
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #1 :
It’s possible to summarize the structure of every story in just four words:
MOTIVATION
COMPLICATION
_______________________________
_______________________________
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #1 :
It’s possible to summarize the structure of every story in just four words:
MOTIVATION
COMPLICATION
CLIMAX
_______________________________
We can visualize this:
Gustav Freytag (1816 – 1895)
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #2:
- A story is a PROBLEM that’s hard to solve.
- It’s such a hard problem it takes the entire story to solve it.
- And even then it might not be solved, it must just have been made worse.
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #3:
- Get a cat up a tree.
- Get it down again.
- Notice how it’s important to not just get the cat down from the tree, but also to
lead the audience through the cat getting up there in the first place.
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #4:
- Tie a knot.
- Untie it.
- Not as dramatic an image, but it does account for our word ‘denouement’,
deriving from the French word dénouer, meaning to “untie”.
- As with the cat, it’s important to not just untie the knot, but also to walk the
audience through its being tied too.
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #5:
- Make your audience care.
- How do you make your audience care?
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #6:
- 1.
Pose one key narrative question (e.g. will the hero win?) and don’t answer it till the end.
- 2.
Pose a series of other narrative questions, and answer some, but not all (unless it’s the
end of the story), keep enough ‘live’ to retain interest.
- You can think of this as spinning plates in the air, or being an air traffic controller and keeping
enough planes in the air. You have to land some – and keep a flow of them landing, but it’s as
disastrous to land none as to land them all.
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #7:
- Replace the word “AND” with the word “BUT” or “BECAUSE”.
AND
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #7:
- Replace the word “AND” with the word “BUT” or “BECAUSE”.
AND
Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #7:
- Replace the word “AND” with the word “BUT” or “BECAUSE”.
BUT
BECAUSE
DRAMATIC TENSION
What happens next?
It should be causally connected.
Cause and Effect
DRAMATIC IRONY
The audience knows something the
characters don’t.
HOW SHOULD A STORY BEGIN?
AN INCITING EVENT
This is an event that hooks the audience into
the story.
It is when the (a) protagonist is thrust into the
story’s main action.
Take 10 minutes and come up with
an inciting event.
Q&A