Joshua Nuernberger--Week 6--Contextual Storytelling

I'm going to tell you a secret: our game is set on a spaceship. Now, what does that mean contextually for a story?

When creating a narrative experience, our group wanted to accomplish several goals. One of these was the unfolding, peeling away of the narrative, through layers of discovery. How do you give information out to the player, bit by bit, in reclusive enough amounts, yet not overwhelm them with too much data or exposition in the process?

For our model, we wanted to take an approach somewhat akin to Valve's ideology in Half-Life or Portal: all exposition is experienced firsthand through the player. This means that there are no cut-scenes or no info-dumps--all exposition is contained in the player's experience. Inevitably, this may require the player to start in a state of confusion: where am I, who am I, what am I doing here (and so on)? The key after this is to slowly reveal these answers to convey the narrative. Portal does this through Glados' ever-increasing ramblings about the back-story of the Aperture science test labs. Half-Life does this through the radio chatter on the mega phones and through the idle banter of the citizens in line to get processed for evaluation. At the beginning of those games, the player does not know what is going on, but by moving through the environment, the player slowly receives more and more exposition.

So, back to the spaceship--How do you tell the players what they're doing on the space ship, what is its mission, what the other inhabitants are doing there, and everything else therefore associated with the spaceship? Taking in the aforementioned strategy, this means revealing the story one step at a time: who am I, what is my mission, and what is my relationship to the other inhabitants of the ship? After that, the player can move on to other, broader questions, such as, what is the ship doing, what is its goal, and its ultimate destination? In terms of contextual storytelling, that is one narrative solution that we proposed.

What do the rest of you think? Any other methods of narrative storytelling in games you find unique, interesting, or useful?