FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Storytelling
Many games incorporate some kind of story as part of the entertainment. In conventional games, players can find it difficult to become immersed in a story because the players must also implement the rules. Stopping to implement the rules interrupts the players' sense of being in another place or being actors in a plot. Video games can mix storylike entertainment and gamelike entertainment almost seamlessly. To some extent, they can make players feel as if they are inside a story, affecting its flow of events. This has enormous implications for game design and is one of the reasons that video games are more than simply a new kind of game; they are a completely new medium. Many video games—even those that involve the most frenetic action—now include elements of storytelling. Chapter 7, "Storytelling and Narrative," will discuss this concept in detail.
In fact, storytelling is so powerful as an entertainment device that one genre of video game—the adventure game—is starting to move away from the formal concept of a game entirely. Although we still call them games, adventure games are in fact a new hybrid form of interactive entertainment—the interactive story. Chapter 19, "Adventure Games," discusses this and other aspects of adventure games in more detail. As time goes on, we can expect to see more new kinds of game/story/ play experiences emerge that defy conventional descriptions. Video games aren't just games any more.
