<story><title>Designing game narrative</title><url>http://hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>twic</author><text>The thread linking the games Mr Lee praises is that they are, to a large extent, sandboxes. Yes, some of them have endings, but they get the player there by dumping them in a world and letting them do what they like.&lt;p&gt;Portal is the least sandboxy of the games mentioned (maybe apart from Tetris!), in that it has highly structured, intentionally designed levels with well-defined goals, but it still manages to give the player a huge amount of the responsibility for getting through them.&lt;p&gt;A weaker thread is procedural generation. Dwarf Fortress and Brogue have procedurally generated levels. Journey doesn&amp;#x27;t, but probably could have done. Portal doesn&amp;#x27;t, and i doubt could. Tetris kind of does. But that&amp;#x27;s a higher incidence of procedural generation than in the general population of games. Is there something about procedural generation that intrinsically puts narrative responsibility back in the hands of the player? That seems plausible; a game designer who gives up the power to shape levels explicitly gives up some power to shape stories explicitly. Think also about Civilisation and SimCity; the software is entirely story-free, but any given game of either of those is bursting with stories.&lt;p&gt;What tests of this hypothesis are coming down the pipe? No Man&amp;#x27;s Sky is the one that springs to mind.</text></comment>
<story><title>Designing game narrative</title><url>http://hitboxteam.com/designing-game-narrative</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>readerrrr</author><text>Half-Life 1 did this so well. It was primarily a shooter, but if you followed closely you could get a story arch. You never lost control of you character and every cutscene was optionable( except the very first and last, you still need some pacing ). This is why I consider Half-Life 2 an inferior game, even though it does everything else better, you constantly get into situations where the main characters talk for several minutes and you can only watch and wait. HL1&amp;#x27;s gameplay flows, HL2 is a stop-and-go.</text></comment>