Game Design Theory Question

One worthy observation that’s been made on the indie design circuit is the distinct divisions drawn between components of the game. It’s a worthwhile thing to recognize that there’s a difference between player and character: that the player might want things for their character that their character really wouldn’t want. We’ve played that way for years, but new games are actually written that way.

Structural elements that have been identified are situation, scenes, and conflicts. But ultimately are situations, scenes and conflicts really different?

What I’m suggesting is that there’s a thing I’ll term a story element. A story element comprises some kind of a set up – some situation that needs to be resolved. Story elements can be composed of smaller elements. It’s entirely possible that a story element might be added into a larger element. The resolution of an element could be determined merely mechanically, or as the result of the resolutions of it’s sub-events.

How does this relate? Basically, situation is a big story element: it comprises the basic tension of at least a full session of play. It’s composed of several mid-sized story elements (scenes). Each one of the scenes is composed of one or more conflicts, which might be composed of tasks.

What I’m arguing here, from my computer science perspective, is that from point of view of an element, they’re functionally very similar. It’s probably useful to distinguish element-as-situation from element-as-task, but in terms of viewing a game as a way to manipulate a tree of setup-resolution boxes, I think there might be something to considering story-elements as a general class of things.

One consequence is that you get the freedom to subdivide elements as far down as you want to go, and to lay off when you want to.

Any way, this has turned out pretty high-flown, and I’d love to have a more concrete example of how this might work, but I think I need to wrap this one up and go back to fevered theorizing.