As a bard, one single tale can be made to fit a wide variety of different uses. Certain elements can be built up or glossed over depending on your audience and the message that you are trying to convey.

This goes beyond stories having multiple interpretations and actually hinges on changing the story to suit your purpose; you reduce a tale to its skeleton and then flesh it out in such a way that it conforms to your vision.

As a writer, it is typical to build the story to meet the structure of the medium and suit your own strengths, but the story is fixed in both of these cases, with the same events being told in the same way. As a games designer, you can often drop in multiple endings or optional side-quests, but you are essentially just writing static chapters which you can swap in and out.

This is a far cry from a bardic tale, where the same story can be told a hundred ways to reinforce a hundred different moral truths or to better suit your audience. The tale of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, could be told as a bawdy commentary on the rashness of youthful love or a sombre account of how true love requires great sacrifice. Alternatively, you could go with Shakespeare’s version and put it all in.

The point is that a game requires that the developers make a single choice from the list and stick to it, but is this the only way? Can we not give the player a choice of tales and let them pick one? Since games are so interactive, why not let them change their minds as the game progresses?

As long as Verona looks the same way and Romeo does not suddenly change gender or species, we are not looking at any new art-assets. The dialogue might be problematic, but only if you decide to give the whole game VO.

Perhaps the trick is not to shoehorn this adaptive narrative into a game, but to create the game and the games story around it. Minimise or even remove dialogue and you suddenly remove a large stumbling block. Without any dialogue, it suddenly gets easier to localise too. The onus is suddenly on the writer and the narrative designer, rather than the artists. The central narrative, the skeleton if you will, is just a series of narrative checkpoints, with the player taking an equal role to the writer in choosing their path.

It sounds a little complicated, but does it sound that new?

No… The more I think about it, the more I see that it has already started. Left 4 Dead was the first step in this direction and suddenly I get the feeling that it will not be the last…