For a long time now it’s been possible to play a videogame in such a way that is more or less unique to your playthrough.
By ‘unique’, I mean the order in which you accessed and completed the content in the game.
Stephen Fry explains that shuffling a 52-card deck offers so many unique combinations that ‘nobody’ has ever shuffled the deck in exactly the same way that he does in this clip:
When you think about huge open-world games with their myriad side-quests and optional objectives it becomes easy to see how almost any game can lay claim to offering these combinatorially unique storytelling experiences
Except we all know from experience that it doesn’t work. Game narratives may offer diversions and side-games to pad out the variety of the game’s overall run time, but do practically nothing to change the way that the details of the plot are revealed to the player over time.
The critical path missions often follow a fixed “well-ordered” path as opposed to a “partially ordered” one. Let’s learn what these terms mean.
A well-ordered set is a collection of objects with an order imposed on them such that any two distinct items in it can be meaningfully compared with ‘<‘ or ‘>’ operators.
The integers are well-ordered as we always know where the number ‘14’ stands in relation to every other integer such as ‘2’ or ‘1000’. When you play Spiderman, God of War, or Final Fantasy 7 the critical beats of the story always occur in the same order no matter what you do. You can’t change when Aeris dies in relation to the plot of other compulsory plot elements.
For a plot to be partially ordered, plot elements usually do need to respect some order, but not a perfectly well-ordered one. If we look at 13 Sentinels, AI: The Somnium Files or Sonic Adventure 2 we see that you can some subsets of plot content in any order, even if you can’t skip directly to the end from the start.
What is the appeal of this type of storytelling?
For the player, it means that a compelling and complex narrative can unfurl in a way which feels (and is!) very specific to them.
For the developer? It means that phases of content can be developed in parallel, much in the same way that TV shows are often developed. Pick a show with 24-episode seasons and see how much of the continuity still makes sense if you swap the order of the episodes around a little!
Next time we’ll get practical about this topic and explore how the popular ‘lock system’ works in modern narrative first games!