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)

Please close your laptop. 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)

How big should the conflict be? The Scope of Conflict How big should the conflict be?

It should FEEL HUGE to the characters at the center of it. 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: ___________________________________ _______________________________

MOTIVATION Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #1 : It’s possible to summarize the structure of every story in just four words: MOTIVATION _______________________________

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 _______________________________

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 CLIMAX _______________________________

We can visualize this: Gustav Freytag (1816 – 1895)

A story is a PROBLEM that’s hard to solve. 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.

AND Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #7: Replace the word “AND” with the word “BUT” or “BECAUSE”. AND

AND Useful Ways Of Thinking About Story Structure #7: Replace the word “AND” with the word “BUT” or “BECAUSE”. AND

BUT BECAUSE 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