on writing games

main character's background

In traditional media, the reader has a single role, that of the audience.

In interactive stories, this becomes complicated because there are three roles at the same time: audience, actor, and player.

This introduces a somewhat profound problem in relation to the information available to them.

A character in a book (the actor) exists in the world. They have a pre-existing background that helps them function coherently.

In a video game, the player usually doesn’t have this background, they bring their own, so there is a disconnect in their role as an actor.

This problem exists to a lesser extent in traditional media: the viewer doesn’t have the same information as the actor. But it is usually subtly resolved in the introductions of the stories.

I believe that this is one of the reasons why narrative games tend towards the mystery genre: because neither the player nor the character have the background, but they have to discover everything.

Another go-to is heroism: there’s not much background needed to play the heroic role, it’s very well understood.

If we can create tutorials to teach very complex mechanics, why is there little work done in the construction of the character’s background?

I think the solution to avoiding the easiness of mystery/heroism lies in learning to write good introductions to our stories.

Do you know any game that doesn’t rely on mystery/heroism and that provides a very good introduction to the world and the character’s background to give you the tools to become a good actor?