In writing my latest mod, I've repeatedly come up against the problem of creating a world with a compelling story that still allows for discovery and takes advantage of the medium. I face a pair of warring impulses here. For someone used to traditional writing, there's an incredible pull towards the cutscene-heavy and the cinematic: I keep trying to shoehorn the game into another format, to make it a comic or short story instead of a game.
On the other hand, I'm perhaps too familiar with the tropes of first-person horror and science-fiction shooters (it's a first-person adventure game, a custom story for Amnesia.) Nearly all the games in the genre I'm working in, including Amnesia itself, share two features: An unfamiliar environment and a blank protagonist. Sometimes the environment is new, and sometimes you're amnesiac; in either case, you the player are free both to define your character as you want and to have your character discover new information as you discover it.
When Isaac from the first Dead Space or Jack from Bioshock hears an audio log, he's not coming to the table with any more information than you are, and his character isn't expected to have an opinion on the matter--or, if he is, it's supposed to be filled in by the player. In a film or short story, we might have a page of exposition to talk about the backstory to an event, or to show the effect it has. In a game, we have only the event.
But what do we do, then, when the character is supposed to know things the player isn't? On a purely practical level, it means that they already know about timed hits, so to speak. Any kind of tutorial needs to take place between the world and the player, but that's not too difficult. The really difficult part is getting the player to learn the rules of a world--what does it look like? How does it work?
Fallout 3, in particular, gives you an entire childhood in order to create a unity between the understanding of character and player. But how do you do the opposite effectively: Drop a player into a character and a world and let them figure both out as they go along. That's what I'm trying to do, and it's something that's standard for all other media--so why not games, I suppose.
This means that, in general, I have to do two things. I have to give enough context that players can function in the world, and I have to give enough exposition (through text, events, etc.) that players can relate to the character and the later events of the story. The first, for me, isn't all that different from the way it would be done with most games--it's your standard post-apocalyptic game in many ways, even if the apocalypse is more personal than most. The second is the real problem.
