Hannah Nicklin

Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Familial relationships do often adhere to a stereotype or format, but to turn from stereotype to character, consider how you will complicate your characters, and demonstrate that through dialogue-driven exposition.

Choice and agency are part of the material of storytelling in games – and you can make decisions against the grain of players’ expectations for better storytelling.

Characterisation can be derived from disagreement, silence, and lack of effect.

What’s important is that the player is acting, leaning in, and playing ‘as’ the character very often.

David Edgar, How Plays Work

It has been necessary to cut a lot of nuance and detail in attempting to summarise game design processes and roles in so short a space, so if you would like a whole book dedicated to it, I recommend Richard Lemarchand’s A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone).

Do not trust someone whose only source is McKee and Snyder with game story decisions.

That is, our lives have a beginning and they have an end. What happens in between is (by process of elimination) a ‘middle’. Maybe you might throw ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, ‘young adult’, ‘middle age’ and ‘old age’ in there. Congratulations, you invented the five-act structure.

One of the earliest records we have of someone saying there should be a beginning, middle, and an end was Aristotle. We tend to over-represent the authority of people like Aristotle because of a mix of distance and coincidence.