Présentation de l'éditeur
Excerpted from Game Design : The Art & Business of Creating Games by Bob Bates, Andre Lomothe. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In the end, your game should be your hero’s story. Sure, you have to
be careful not to screw up what makes a good game in the first place,
but you can still make the gameplay experience even more interesting
by wrapping a good story around it.
Each genre is restrictive – we’ve got conventions we must observe, and it might seem that there is little room for creativity – but they are certainly less hidebound than the genre of the Elizabethan “Revenge Tragedy,” which is what Shakespeare was faced with when his producer told him to sit down and bat out the play he eventually called Hamlet.
But it’s not good enough to understand how to tell a story; you also need a story worth telling.
Don’t sell this short. You can’t just say, “Hey, it would be cool to have this villain kidnap the hero’s sister and now he has to go rescue her.” This can be where you end up, but it should not be where you start.
Where do you start?
You are the author. Your job is to have a vision, a purpose, a greater truth. You have the job of any artist. You need to think of yourself as a hero – not a Lawrence of Arabia-kind of hero but a Joseph Campbell-kind of hero. Every author and every artist must make what Campbell calls the hero’s journey. You must step outside conventional society or philosophy and look back at the way things really are, or perhaps the way you think they should be. You must go beyond the boundaries of the known and accepted in search of something new and important.
What you acquire on the Journey is the Hero’s Prize. It is that thing which only you know. Many of you have probably already taken that journey. You have a vision of your own, a personal slice of reality, something that you know in your heart is true, even though the rest of the world doesn’t believe it.
When you find it, you must bring it back to us so that we will all benefit from it. That is what a hero does. That is what you must do.
If you take that journey, that piece of knowledge will become imbedded in your story. Not in a preachy way – it will just be there.
So before you sit down to write a story game, think hard about that thing which only you know. If you do, it will subtly inform all the design decisions you make in your game. It will be the thing that sustains your interest across the eighteen months to two years you will be working on the project. Eventually, it will become the thing that your game is about. And that story will be one worth playing.
