Exploration of Narrative Structure in Games for Story Creation
Bethany Dunfield · 2018
While video games have become a popular medium for storytelling, as a more subjective form of game content, evaluation of written or generated narratives remains difficult.We propose a model for game narrative (the combination of story and its discourse) that can be used to both help write game stories, and evaluate existing ones.This model is based on scholarly models of narrative, alongside narrative structuralism, which can give information about each narrative event and its' position within the overall sequence of events making up the story.We also show from the literature that strong stories feature an external goal or quest which can only be achieved by a character resolving their own internal struggles.To create our model, we performed a study of existing video game stories, using the aggregate critical score as our metric for quality.Stories were broken down into their component events, and data was logged about each event's importance, whether it sourced internally from a character or externally, and whether the event corresponded to a component of narrative macrostructures such as "The Hero's Journey".Results from our analysis show a strong relationship between the ratio of internal "character-driven" events versus external "plot-driven" events and a story's quality.We were also able to make recommendations about overall story event structure, such as limiting strings of external, or "plot-driven", events.I would also like to thank Dr. Ali Arya, who stepped in to fill Anthony's shoes.Coming into a project in its late stages, and having no knowledge of what we had done before is a difficult situation.However, Ali worked hard to make sure the adjustment went as smoothly as possible.My thanks extend to the entire administration and faculty of the School of Information Technology, who went above and beyond to make the transition for us students as easy as they could, despite dealing with the loss of a valued colleague and friend.