Different ways

Yesterday we hit a bit of a dead end on different ways of telling a story through a game. We found out from a lot of our discussions that most of the ways we thought about have already been done before. I'm wondering if it actually matters whether or not it's been done before though. Imagine, through generations and generations of humans thinking and making things, I doubt much is truly original any more. I think it's more about doing the same thing, but in a different way. Or using something for something else that you won't normally think of. Basically, using something that's already there but in an ingenious way.

Some things we all agreed on was that we wanted the game to be like a story book. I imagine the game we want to make is like a book, movie, and game mashed up together. For me, I want the narrative to have a natural flow and many possibilities. I obviously don't have children, but I think when you tell children stories one day you'd run out of stories to tell. They'll want you to tell them a new story.

So keeping that in mind I had an idea of what we could do. We could have a selection of characters, locations and decision points. The character and location would be selected randomly. As the person plays through the story, each decision point has the chance to spin the story in a new direction.

Let's say we have 5 characters, 10 locations, and 5 decisions to make in 25 stages.

nPr = n! / ( n - r )!

so:

( 5! / 4! ) x ( 10! / 9! ) x ( 5! / 4! ) x 25 = 5 x 10 x 5 x 25
= 6250 stories

They won't all be different though, which is something my group pointed out. It depends on the decision the player chooses whether or not the story would take a new turn. If 2 out of 5 of the decisions can change to something completely different then I think there would be this many different stories:

( 6250 / 5 ) x 2 = 2500 stories

Another thing is that if there are so many decision points where the story could change, how do you make sure that the story still makes sense? That's the difficult part. It WILL be difficult, but it won't be impossible. I think we could do it well, it all depends on how you write each decision so that it still makes sense with previous events.


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This idea got banned though. Mainly because the group thinks it would be too difficult and the work load for this would be too great for the time frame that we have.