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....
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Perspective on the hobby from a long-time gamer, as well as little ideas and discussions about game design.
In my experience, categorizing games is like categorizing fauna? It's useful up to a point, but you'll always have things that don't fit and each example still has to be taken on its own merits.
ReplyDeleteLet me see if I understand your terms enough to paraphrase them:
"True Sandbox": Game with coherent setting, but minimal narrative premise. Objectives, identity and stakes are largely self-determined by the player.
"Narrative Sandbox": Open-world games that acknowledge & respond to the Player Character's actions in some fashion, while offering some kind of narrative premise.
"Limited Sandbox": Non-"open-world" games that acknowledge & respond to the Player Character's actions in some fashion, while offering some kind of narrative premise.
While there's nothing wrong with picking open-world games as an arbitrary subcategory to write about, I'd argue criteria like "third person camera" and "regenerating hp" would create categories of games that were just as distinct (e.g. not very) and whose unique trait did just as much for narrative (e.g. provides interesting and subtle influences, rather than having a major effect.)
As commented in the other post, would certainly love to chat. Skype and gtalk are most reliable methods, contact info's on my site.
Yeah, 'sandbox' is just a term I tend to use for 'open world' games that let you go and do whatever.
ReplyDeleteThe lines I draw along the True/Narrative/Limited progression are admittedly kinda arbitrary. It's less accurate to say there's three broad categories and more that there's a sliding scale between individual freedom and narrative structure.
The thing is I just needed to draw the line somewhere when I use a really broad term like 'sandbox' or 'open world' for the sake of coherency. Since you could argue the term fit all the way from Minecraft to Harvest Moon depending on how you twist it...
Also, the main reason I picked 'open world' was to talk about the difference in narrative structure rather than a mechanical one. Take Gears of War and Halo: The mechanics are extremely different but the basic narrative form is similar.
What I'm talking about is more how the nature of interaction, more specifically the degree of interaction, affects storytelling. Open world/Sandbox games are something I just happen to have a lot of experience with from all angles, and therefor can give the best advice on.
Actually, after putting more thought into it, I think it would be more accurate to use the term 'sandbox' for a specific type of open-world game.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'm probably going to stick with 'sandbox' in this context just for the sake of using consistent terminology here.