How To Avoid It

Much has been written on the art of crafting a storyline, so I won't labour too much on the subject when other, more qualified writers have already gone there. What I will do is go through one or two points of advice that I've found personally useful since the days when I was twelve years old and writing about time-travelling Hitler clones from the moon.

1. Conflict

There are only two kinds of stories that don't have any conflict — bad ones, and boring anecdotes that get told at family reunions. It's a very poorly crafted game that begins with the player learning their ultimate goal and ends with them achieving that very same goal, with no diversions on the way. Take the Lure of the Temptress example above. You are told at the beginning you have to defeat an evil demon witch queen thing, which I suppose is technically a conflict, but the game ends when you march into her palace and do just that. That's not an adventure — that's an errand. No one would go on a roller coaster that trundles around an unsloping track for five minutes then returns. When I say 'conflict', I mean twists and turns and revelations that change your entire outlook of the game, your entire goal.

A game with a poor story gives you the entire background in a few paragraphs just before playing, with some crude objective like 'rescue Princess Dumbo', and then the game trundles on with no major events until her royal braindead majesty is recovered. A good story is told all throughout the game, not just right at the beginning. Think of Grim Fandango. That's got one of the best plots in adventure gaming history, but how much of it are you aware of at the start? Very, very little, and it's only towards the end, through conflict after conflict, that you finally realise your true objective. Treat exposition like cheesecake. Give it out in small portions and no one will get a sick tummy.

2. Characters

If there's one thing that will strike out an adventure game before I even get into it, it's having Jimmy Nodepth as a main character. Jimmy Nodepth has many names and many faces, but his pattern is always the same. He arrives at the beginning of a game with no particular wants or desires, no relevant backstory, and blunders into adventure by accident. He is a tragic figure, because no player cares about him in the slightest. He watches in envy as his friend Sally Wellcharacterised goes off to adventure with her new-fangled drives, motivations and mysterious past.

Jimmy Nodepth has many brothers and sisters who also populate adventure games as non-player characters. You will recognise them by the way they stand immobile at street corners and in the middle of rooms for no apparent reason, and whose conversation is generically sarcastic and motivated around handing out fetch quests. In terms of service to the game, they are interchangeable with doors that require keys.

The most obvious thing to do with NPCs is to make sure they are wherever they are for a purpose. It doesn't take THAT long to make some 'sitting down reading' sprites, or 'painting a fence' sprites. But if you want your NPCs to have a degree of depth to their personalities, then here's the best piece of advice I've ever been given in that regard: assign each character a particular personality trait, like anger or fear or the desire to please, and exaggerate it. Try to bring it across in most if not all of their dialogue lines. That's it; that's all you have to do. You might also want to consider why they are in their current situation, what devices exist to keep them in that situation, and what they hope to get out of it. No real human being would stand outside their garden fence staring at a wall hoping some canny adventurer will come along and fix their TV.

A Game That Does This Well

There are tons of amateur adventure games with good storylines, but I'd particularly like to plug Cirque de Zale by Kinoko, because of the way it consciously parodies hackneyed adventure game plots. The game opens with Alexander Zale being tasked by the king of a magical land to find his kidnapped princess, whereupon he gets completely blown off, and instead the player spends the game putting together a circus for Zale's own selfish satisfaction. It's very well done and amusing to watch, especially since you actually walk past the princess' cell at one point, are unable to open the door, and so leave her to rot.

Of course, it's still set in the usual adventure game mysterious fantasy land, even if it is taking large quantities of mickey, and that's what I really think we all need to get away from. We've got this medium we can use to tell and re-tell some of the greatest stories in the world; a medium whose interactive nature possibly adds even more artistic validity, and we're just using it to re-tread old ground and ESCAPE FROM MY HOUSE. Let's just buckle down, sit around the campfire, and tell some damn stories.