Sandcastles

Recently a friend of mine said I should write a book on proper game design from a storytelling perspective.

I'm frankly unsure about actually committing to an entire BOOK, in part because I honestly don't think I have enough fans/credit/market-space for it to really go out. Partly as well because my own ability as a storyteller, I feel anyway, needs refinement.

In any case, since there's been an expressed interest in what I have to say on the topic; and snippets of said advice have been well received, I thought I would do a few pieces on running/creating a sandbox game.

Defining the Sandbox.

The first question is in what sort of Sandbox we're talking about. When someone describes a Sandbox game, there's a few directions they could be taking that in.

A True Sandbox offers more or less unlimited freedom of action. There's a few solid rules in place, but they serve mainly to give you a point of reference and a solid environment to create your own fun. Minecraft is currently the best example of this sort of game, though there's a lot of games that let you build cities and theme-parks that qualify.

Honestly, I have no advice for you here. It's almost purely mechanical and my strong point is in narrative.


A Narrative Sandbox is what most people think of when they hear the term. These are games like Skyrim or GTA: Open worlds to explore and experience, but each thread in the tapestry is carefully woven and placed. In this type of Sandbox, you have considerably less freedom. You can pick what you wear and what you do, you have a choice of what paths you want to walk (often opening new ones and closing others as you progress), and people's perception of you will change based on what you've done and how you've done it.

This is pretty much going to be the primary focus of what I'm going to be talking about, this area here. It offers a overall high level of freedom to the player in general, and allows you to still script and write scenarios within certain boundaries.

Before I move on with the rest of what I have to say, I just wanted to talk about why the term 'scenario' is so important in this context. The biggest mistake people tend to make when writing for games is in writing 'plot'. They see the plot, and try to make a story out of it. When you write for a game, the 'plot' is the overall narrative framework the game exists in. You don't write a story, your write scenarios. Things the player(s) stumble across and get involved in. You don't solve the problems for them, you create a problem for them to solve.

Story is what happens when Players and Scenarios collide. Keep that in mind and your writing will improve instantly, guaranteed.


The last category, and one I will be spending little time on, is the Limited Sandbox. Which is more or less exactly what it sounds like. The opposite extreme of the 'True' sandbox. Whereas a True sandbox gives you total freedom (eg, Minecraft 'You are a dude.') and Narrative gives you a SENSE of freedom (eg, Skyrim 'You are a dude in a place where things are happening.'), Limited gives you a small area of complete freedom within a greater whole (eg, Harvest Moon 'You area dude in a place with a farm and things are happening. You can totally pick what crops to grow and who to mack on.').

There's a lot of games that could be considered partial/limited sandboxes, but frankly this is where the most overlap happens between a sandbox and other forms of world-building/exploring. The main reason I'll be spending not a lot of time with it is simply because it could be represented well by advice offered by the other categories.


This will be an interesting series to write....