Hannah Nicklin

Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Familial relationships do often adhere to a stereotype or format, but to turn from stereotype to character, consider how you will complicate your characters, and demonstrate that through dialogue-driven exposition.

Choice and agency are part of the material of storytelling in games – and you can make decisions against the grain of players’ expectations for better storytelling.

Characterisation can be derived from disagreement, silence, and lack of effect.

What’s important is that the player is acting, leaning in, and playing ‘as’ the character very often.

David Edgar, How Plays Work

Games exceptionalism – as I’m going to term it – is a totally understandable position, but not a healthy one.

If you believe that if you tell a story in a game, that it is automatically immersive, then you
are failing to understand videogames as a material.

It has been necessary to cut a lot of nuance and detail in attempting to summarise game design processes and roles in so short a space, so if you would like a whole book dedicated to it, I recommend Richard Lemarchand’s A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone).

Do not trust someone whose only source is McKee and Snyder with game story decisions.