Difference between revisions of "Open Destiny"

Revision as of 11:19, 11 December 2010

The ability of agents to have different narrative arcs between game instances due to the events that took place in the game session.

Examples

Open Destiny has strong connections to the idea of multiple endings, and many more examples can be found in Wikipedia article on the subject.

Using the pattern

For different types of ending to be noticeable different there cannot be too many. For example, the exact fate of countries in Victoria 2 can vary in very many different minor ways (government, social reforms, colonies, technology, alliances, etc.) but these have to add up in certain ways for them to become a noticeable major differences in outcome. The rules regarding unifying countries (for Italy and Germany) are however easy to use to see what fate a country had in a particular game instance - either the many smaller countries became a nation state or they did not.

An easy way to provide clear options to players when using Open Destiny is to use Selectable Set of Goals which are linked to a significantly high level to a game's Narration Structure. Each of these goals can then be seen as one destiny and players know that other destinies are possible than the one they are striving for.

It may not be clear to players that NPCs and Factions have Open Destinies. The use of Cut Scenes that describe what happened after gameplay ended can solve this since the act of telling this can indicate that other endings were possible (this is especially clear if the Cut Scenes relate to how players solved or failed to solve goals and Quests). Examples of games which use this for NPCs include BioShock, Dragon Age, Façade, Army of Two: The 40th Day, Heavy Rain, Jade Empire, while Final Fantasy 7 in the Final Fantasy series and Fallout New Vegas in the Fallout series use Cut Scenes both for the fate of NPCs and Factions. Producing all the possible Cut Scenes for multiple Open Destinies add to the increased effort required for making Narration Structures support Open Destinies in the first place. However, games with Game Masters, for example tabletop roleplaying games and LARPs, do not have this problem since the Cut Scenes can in these cases be improvised.

Diegetic Aspects

Interface Aspects

Narrative Aspects

Consequences

Just as Selectable Set of Goals can be used to provide Open Destiny, the existence of Open Destiny with clear differences between the destinies can provide players with Selectable Set of Goals.

In general, Open Destiny promotes Replayability. It can also give rise to Meta Games based on the Collection goal of reaching all possible endings, and this can be mechanized through the use of Achievements.

Relations

Can Instantiate

Can Modulate

Algorithmic Agents

Can Be Instantiated By

Can Be Modulated By

Possible Closure Effects

Potentially Conflicting With

History

A rewrite of a pattern that was part of the original collection in the paper Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters^[1].

References

1. ↑ Lankoski, P. & Björk, S. (2007) Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters. Proceedings of DiGRA 2007.

Acknowledgments

Jon Back, Jason Begy, Daniel Bernhoff, Sicheng Chen, Steve Dahlskog, Martin Dujmovic, Anders Elfgren, Erik Fagerholt, Arshad Fendi Jan Humble, Kristine Jørgensen, Ben Kirman, Robin Kullberg, Dmitry Kurteanu, Jonas Linderoth, Mathias Nordvall, Jonathan Osborne, Gillian Smith, Jaakko Stenros, Anders Tryggvesson, Johan Weisz, Jose Zagal