Story telling in games and player attention span

Giancarlo is an ambitious young alpinist in 19th century Italy. After hearing about the exploits of a famed soloist alpinist, he decides that he will put his name down in history as the first man to solo climb the impossible north face of ______ mountain.

Climbing gameplay could be very interesting -- not something I've seen done well ever, but I think some serious brainstorming and testing could make a climbing game pretty unique and fun.

This would need to be a challenging game, and perhaps last a bit longer than most players would want. But not TOO much longer.

By the time Giancarlo summits the impossible north face, he is broken. He is beyond exhausted, hypothermic, and all he wants to do is be off the damn mountain and in the comfort of his family home.

At the end, we can have a press crew waiting for him, but he has realized if such is the price for fame, he wants nothing to do with fame. Or, when he finally gets home and engorges nonni's homemade bread and pasta, and the only thing anybody has to say is how worried they were, he realizes that nothing special happened at the summit -- the whole time he was up there he only wanted to be down here, and can only laugh at himself as he reaches a new level of wisdom.... Or, maybe he gets back down, but nobody is there, nobody knnows what he did, and worse, nobody believes him when he tells them. So.... sequel!

Point of it all -- fame, ambition... this is all stuff that only exist in our own heads. So long as you got a family and a home, nothing else matters.

 

And one final one because I've already procrastinated enough that I might as well just give up on getting much work done today at this point:

Here is a classic medieval fantasy.

Princess needs a husband, but their is no suitable suitors in the realm. What to do then? A bounty. Whichever man can go forth and bring the most impressive trophy as a means to showcase his courage, strength, and tenacity to the lady, shall become her prince.

Nelrod, the village idiot, decides he will slay a dragon, much to the amusement of the townfolk. So he sets off on a Quixote'esque quest to find a dragon and kill it (with his trusty pitchfork). Nelrod travels far and wide, facing many challenges and discovering things no one from his land would ever believe.

Gameplay and story can be zaney, fun, or even challenging. No limits to imagination here.

Along the way, Nelrod meets Greta, a very, very - extremely - plain woman who takes some interest in Nelrods character, and becomes his squire.

Nelrod, being a dense moron, manages to not pick up the fact that Greta has fallen in love with him for the entire length of the journey, and only sees her as a fantastic friend and partner.

So after questing to the mysterious lands beyond the realm of men, they find their dragon and kill it.

Only at the end, when Nelrod brings an actual dragons head to the princess and is duly pronounced the prince, does he realize that this would mean he has to part ways with Greta. Obviously, he's not going to do that, so he marries Greta instead. Princess is left with a stinking lump of dragon flesh, and Knight who killed a lion suddenly puts on his best smile.

Point of it all? Come on, I don't need to explain this one. Love = friendship. Friendship = love. Marriage = ultimate friendship.


Note: Greta could be something more like Esmerelda. I.E, a foreigner to Nelrod's countrymens eyes. Then, in addition to friendship=love, you can make the very timely point that love is blind. Race and culture are non-consideration, etc. Heck, maybe she could be beautiful too? I htink I like a very ugly woman more though. I get tired of seeing idealized characters all the time.

 

@BIGTIMEMASTER wow, very good story-bases! Excellent starting point for indie games. Also check out the Tokyo Jungle if you have the opportunity, you may like that game.

 

When I looked it up, I suddenly remembered seeing some hype or reviews about that game. Must have been a long time ago. It actually looks super interesting to me now, as my favorite game idea's involve playing as animals.

Anyway, its unfortunate that it's not on steam, otherwise I'd get it in a heartbeat.

 

Although these are just the vague idea's of stories, the reason I can come up with them quickly and easily is because they all come from something I know about, even if only a little bit. I think that is the key. Draw inspiration from your own life -- not from your gaming experience or your personal interest -- and then you end up with unique ideas that are entirely your own, but are still very relatable to other humans.

Anything can be turned into a game. You may have to add some comedy or stretch the limits of realism, but that's all fine in a game. Expected.

 

No need. I get what you like.

 

Mr. Eberhardt is a philanthropist who owns vast swaths of the Amazon Rainforest. For fifty years he has made painstaking effort to keep the land safe from human designs, but he is most proud about keeping one of last un-contacted tribes in the world remain so. But recently powerful logging and mining corporations have gotten the local governments to concede to their interest, and Mr. Eberhardt knows this means doom for the tribes.

Out of options, Eberhardt makes a desperate bid. He goes into the jungle to contact the tribes himself-- knowing he could very well be killed -- but he has to try to warn them of the impending danger. Eventually, he gets his message across, but to his surprise he finds that the tribespeople consider him something like a prophet, and a war chief. He knows that violence will result in the tribes people being killed, so he spins some kind of story -- anyway, final result is he leads the tribes people in pure stealth gameplay in which you sabotage equipment, scare the crap out of people, and avoid dangerous armed guards. The goal is to cause so much mischief and property damage -- while remaining unseen -- to make the loggers/miners abandon their project. Kind of like Ghandi's no-violence movement, but in this case in a rainforest and more focused on sabotage rather than social protest.

This is a bit far fetched, but at least its something different.

 

What makes you think that? I seriously doubt that your tastes are so weird that no one else would like the same thing.

As long as the overall quality of execution is high I think I've never seen anything that was made to be loved by one person, that wasn't loved by others as well. It is when many people get involved, that I see the number of people liking it go up, but the number of people loving it goes down, because you're sanding down all the sharp edges and corners that some love but others hate, and the end-result gets blander, but may have broader appeal.

I imagine anyone with a creative job where they mostly execute based on input from others, would consider it a thoroughly wasted opportunity not to do entirely their own thing for once, when they work on a hobby project. Thinking much about what others would think of it makes it feel like work again, at least to me.

 

We are not working exclusively on a hobby project. If we were, then yeah, I would agree. If I was making something just for a hobby, I would be making a much different game. We actually have a business, with employees and we have done outside contracts. While we are not doing this as our full time income, we are doing it as a side business.

The story ideas were interesting. While we already have the outline for our story, yours give me some structure ideas.

One issue I have with some of the comments though are using idiots to describe people who write things you do not enjoy or that you think are stupid.

As a parent, I have read many stupid stories my kids write. But you know what? Even there simple stupid stories have validity and with some maturity and editing and experience, those stories have turned into very good stories. All of my kids are good writers and they do not write things that suck. One creates table top games through his stories, which are very popular, and another one has a writing blog and she has many followers. While you may say that popularity does not mean the stories are good, it does mean that many people enjoy them. The measure of a good story is whether or not it is heard, not whether you like it.

There are plenty of stories I do not like, some of them are among those you wrote. But I find value in them because of the structure and creativity, even if I find the actual story overdone.

Never in a million years would I call you stupid or say that your stories suck. We all have different tastes.

 

Yes, I use words like idiot, stupid, etc., frivolously. It is not only impolite, but it probably doesn't help me get my point across. But I yam what I yam. Usually when I say something is idiotic, what I am really saying is that it's something I maybe would have used to like, but now I'm too old, jaded, cynical, etc. to enjoy.

I only use those words in a broad sense. I don't use those words towards a specific work....unless it is a full price AAA game that lots of people hype up, so I don't do due diligence and buy the $60 game hoping for the next great gaming experience, but, as usual, it's a heaping pile of..... gameplay and design choices that I do not care for in my current mindset.

More specifically, I am more apt to use derogatory terms towards games that are actually marketed to a "mature" crowd. Like, say, The Witcher 3. Supposedly this is a very mature game, but it seems to me more like a horny 13 year old boys power fantasy. That's not very mature, is it?

 

In the defense of fantasy (not limited to 13 years old fantasy), I have a friend who flee away death from the pinochet regime, she want nothing about your "indie real life inspired story", she had enough of that in her life, that's her rational, fantasy is all about escaping, to get into a place where you have agency. For her people who like those story are people who have a comfortable life and don't know what's like to be in constant threat, she argue that people who life under threat and create these story don't want them for themselves, but to communicate with other and be understood. That's also why Black panther and wakanda is such a big deal now, when you have an existence where society is entirely predicated on humiliating and rejecting you, fictional uplifting fantasy become a big deal, that's the only place where you can have agency and recognition.

I'm not saying those are absolutely true, but this is an interesting perspective to consider.

 

Excellent point. I do not know what is like being in constant threat. But I do know that the feelings, whatever chemicals are created in my brain when I am playing a game where I am under constant threat are not fun for me. I do not enjoy such things.

I imagine someone who has been traumatized in the past likes that even less. Again, and I seem to say this a lot, is exactly why we need more people with different backgrounds, a more diverse group of developers, to make games that appeal to people who have had all sorts of experiences. A person who lives in an inner city where they had to deal with guns, violence, gangs, and drugs while growing up, might not enjoy a game about people driving around killing each other with guns.

I like games that do not put me in the real world. Again, as Neoshaman said, games where the player has agency, can make a difference in the world rather than a regular old person who is as frustrated as me with the state of the REAL world. lol Why would I want to play that game? The news gives me heartburn, why spend my free time feeling frustrated?

 

A thief thinks everybody steals.

The news gives me heartburn, too, but I don't find solace in fantasy worlds, because, to me, all they ever seem to be is simplified, idealized, or downright silly versions of our own world.

I think the world -- and I mean this is this is a literal, non-human-centric connotation -- is an awesome and endlessly entertaining place. I suppose I play games to forget the human world for awhile, too, but I guess I prefer games closer to the side of simulation, as these are about doing something, whereas fantasy games are usually about some kind of artistic experience, which is to me... well, most art I think is too poorly realized to be worthwhile.

I guess I just like things that make sense.

Just my opinion