taming the rhizome

Game designers have a basic design tool: the mechanics.

These are things that the player can do to change the state.

A typical example is "jumping". Or "running".

In narrative games, "choosing an option" is a mechanic.

A very common practice for designers is to choose a mechanic and design around it.

That is, to explore all the ways that this mechanic can be used and that are interesting.

Once they exhaust a mechanic, if it's not enough to sustain a game, they explore another mechanic and eventually the combination of both.

This strategy is precisely to solve a problem that we share when writing dynamic stories: taming the rhizome.

Game designers could create endless rules for special cases, and these rules generate first and second order consequences that greatly complicate the design.

Many games suffer from this problem and become incoherent.

If we write without thinking too much, and we constantly create ad-hoc variables to represent such and such a state, it becomes very difficult for us to maintain coherence throughout our story.

It's already difficult to be coherent in a linear story, imagine if there are 120 variables that we have to keep in mind at all times.

That's why it's a good idea to sit down and think: what is the minimum set of variables that I can have in my story, so that it's not too difficult for me to reason about it but at the same time it's interesting for the player?

In Dance of the Spirits, I'm experimenting with 3 very important variables, which I'm using for the definition of the story and the consequences of actions, and 5 or 6 that are less relevant.

The important variables are defined quite early in the story, one is randomized and the other two are tied to some player decisions.

The less relevant variables have more to do with enabling or disabling options to the player according to the actions they took, but they do not significantly affect the story.

My estimate is that the game is going to have about 35,000 or 40,000 words.

I'm still not clear if the 3 variables are enough to generate something interesting, but I think they are.

I share this to start identifying some kind of parameter of what might be needed depending on the size of the story.

If you have worked on a narrative game that did something like this (designing the story around a bunch of variables), I'd love to hear your experience! Reply to this email and let me know.