(BQ) Part 2 book "The art of game design" has contents: One kind of experience is the story; story and game structures can be artfully merged with indirect control; stories and games take place in worlds; worlds contain characters; worlds contain spaces; each designer has a motivation;. and other contents. | FIFTEEN CHAPTER One Kind of Experience Is the Story FIGURE 261 CHAPTER FIFTEEN • ONE KIND OF EXPERIENCE IS THE STORY God never wrote a good play in his life. – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle Story/Game Duality At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: Waves and particles were the same thing both manifestations of a singular phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy, and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite as well as we had thought. Now it is the dawn of the next century, and storytellers are faced with a similar conundrum. With the advent of computer games, story and gameplay, two age-old enterprises with very different sets of rules, show a similar duality. Storytellers are now faced with a medium where they cannot be certain what path their story will take, just as the physicists found that they could no longer be certain what path their electrons would take. Both groups can now only speak in terms of probabilities. Historically, stories have been single-threaded experiences that can be enjoyed by an individual, and games have been experiences with many possible outcomes that are enjoyed by a group. The introduction of the single-player computer game challenged these paradigms. Early computer games were simply traditional games, such as tic-tac-toe or chess, but with the computer acting as the opponent. In the mid-1970s, adventure games with storylines began to appear that let the player become the main character in the story. Thousands of experiments combining story and gameplay began to take place. Some used computers and electronics, others used pencil and
