You play as Katie, who returns home from overseas and finds her family home empty. Gone Home by The Fullbright Company pioneered the modern story-based exploration video game. To illustrate how the scavenger hunt method can be used to tell compelling stories through interactivity, I’ll provide examples from three different games. This requires immense trust in the player from the developer, who has to relinquish control over which elements are found, in what order, and which part, if any, of the story is eventually told. However, more and more games are adding elements to enrich the game world, and leaving them for players to find. This can be considered backstory, easter eggs, or additional world-building, which in some games and genres critics may deem unnecessary to the main gameplay. It is a way for designers to hide clues to, or portions of a larger story, around the game without forcing the player to uncover the whole story in order to proceed. ![]() The scavenger hunt framework can be used alongside both the string of pearls and story machine methods. ![]() Completing the game is not contingent on the discovery of any or all of the story elements.These narrative elements can be discovered at the player’s discretion in any order within the limits of the game’s design.Designers place non-interactive elements of the story in the game environment for the player to discover.Scavenger Hunt: A Framework for Interactive Storytelling As a result, I’ve come up with a new framework, which I call the “scavenger hunt” method. ![]() Then there are the games with storytelling elements that don’t fit into either of these approaches. Maybe you can fit a story machine into each pearl, or Frankenstein the two methods together in some other way. While I’d probably still classify Journey as primarily using the string of pearls methodology, it’s an example of how the stories we experience from playing a game don’t necessarily fall into one category or the other. Eventually, the story you get from Journey is seldom only the story that the developers have prescribed. But Journey also has vast opportunities for emergent gameplay within its levels that matches more with the story machine technique. Journey, for example, contains a linear progression with cutscenes and checkpoints, which is characteristic of the string of pearls method. Other times, the game is tricky to squeeze into one box, or contains elements from both methods. Batman: Arkham Asylum uses the string of pearls method, while Minecraft is clearly a story machine. Sometimes, a game fits into a box neatly. I often consider which of these two techniques suit the games I play. The string of pearls requires a linear story to be created ahead of time, and the story machine thrives when as little story as possible has been created ahead of time. What is interesting is how opposite they are from each other. In terms of methods of interactive storytelling, these two methods surely cover 99% of all games ever created. While these are not the only two ways to think about stories in games, Schell asserts that these two methods cover the vast majority of games.
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