Next, we will talk on the stories
told through video games and how we explain them.
As we said when we were talking on experience,
story and narration help the player to motivate and
provoke him interest and increase immersion.
In first place, we distinguish between story and narration as they are two different concepts.
Story is the information transmitted or explained
through a video game inside its virtual and fictional world.
Here we include the things that happen to the characters,
either in their present, their past or their future.
Narrative refers to the different techniques used to tell the
story.
Storytelling is the act of narrating what can be done in different ways.
We must remark that in the case of video games,
as in many films, fiction contents are produced
and created especially for their transmission and consumption.
Story and setting are very close
as environments and characters play a key role in both concepts.
In most cases,
the axis moving the action in the stories is a conflict.
A conflict can be understood as a need, request,
mission, order, desire or questioning given
to a character who is usually the story's main character.
This conflict has an origin, engine or cause in an antagonist agent which
the main character must confront in aim to properly solve the conflict.
The conflict's resolution represents the character's change process.
Usually, this need -or not- to change is associated to a moral problem.
The character needs to make a moral decision in aim to solve the conflict.
This way, stories acquire a symbolic and representative content
that associates the narrated facts with the moral, social
and cultural context of the society in which these stories have been created.
So we can simply say that the stories tell us how one or many main
characters solve a conflict by confronting one or many antagonists.
To explain all this,
they usually use a structure divided in 3 acts.
In the first act, the characters are introduced and a motivating incident
that triggers the action happens.
At the end of the first act,
the first inflection point that defines the conflict happens.
In many cases, during the first act the antagonist has already been introduced.
During the second act, the main character tries to develop strategies
to solve the conflict, but he doesn't succeed.
During this period of constant tries,
other characters develop secondary plots,
some of which are used as a support for the main character.
At the end of the second act, the second inflection point happens.
This is used to put to the limit the main character's
options to solve the conflict, and also
to make him see that he has to somehow change his strategy to succeed.
The third act shows how the main character develops his new
strategy and gains ground on antagonists until he gets to the
final battle, which is the climax.
When this climax is over, there is the ending and
the final goodbye, which is used to meet the main characters
and be able to see the benefits of their changes from their own perspectives.
This structure is present in many artistic disciplines
although it's more evident in the cinema.
To put an example, we will talk on it in the film Back to the Future from 1985.
The first act goes from the beginning to the moment when Marty McFly accidentally travels
to the past, to 1955.
Then the conflict -going back home in 1985- is defined.
In the second act, he tries to get this objective,
contacting doctor Brown to get his help.
But, unintentionally, he causes a problem with his parents, breaking their romance
so he can't go home.
The second act ends when Marty gets away from Beef and buries him in
fertilizer, moment in which his mother falls in love with him,
asking him to take her to the school dance.
In this second inflection point, Marty changes his strategy,
and he tries to give his father confidence to seduce his mother.
During the third act, this strategy works in an unexpected way.
And finally, the father, George McFly, defeats Beef
and wins Lorraine's heart, allowing Marty to go back to the present.
The final climax is the final solution of Marty's conflict,
with doctor Brown's help, gets back to his present.
When Marty goes back to the present they are all alive and safe,
but the situation has changed.