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About six years too late, I finally watched the Pilot episode(s) of Lost. It was pretty fantastic. A couple of things I noticed:
- The characters were introduced gently. Usually in pairs. This allowed the audience to cling to remember Jack and Kate or Annoying Brat Girl and Brother. It was a lot easier to form associations among all these characters when they were interdependent.
- There were very few introductions. All of a sudden, characters were referring to each other by name. The most memorable of these was Hurley. All of a sudden, everyone is referring to the Big Guy as Hurley. No time was wasted with worthless "Hi, my name is...".
- Each character is hiding something. The audience may not know what it is yet, but we get the sense that everyone has a secret. Kate hides that she's a convict. The Black Dad is hiding his unfamiliarity with his son. Charlie is hiding his drug addiction. One of my big questions is about Creepy Bald Guy playing backgammon with the kid. He's certainly hiding something...
- The writers are controlling very tightly the flow of information. One of my favorite scenes was the discovery of the pilot in the cockpit. Finally, after 16 hours, there is a character who may actually know something. As a viewer, I was watching and waiting for him to start spewing secrets - to help me and the characters understand what happened to them. The whole scene, I was thinking, "Please don't kill the pilot," knowing full well that he was doomed.
Now, as a writer, I perfectly understand what's going on here. Give the characters hope. They expect to find a transceiver. They get a transceiver and a living pilot. But what do the writers do? They not only take away the pilot, but they put the characters into an even worse position - a giant who-knows-what is upon them. As a viewer, I was fully engaged emotionally into this scene, hoping against my instinct that the pilot would live to be a recurring character. Writers are allowed this god-like power. To give and to take away. This is what gives stories emotional pull.
Let's take this home into game writing/design, though. As game designers, we have the power to give and to take away. As a DM, I have the power to put a huge treasure horde at the end of a dungeon. And, to give them more, maybe this horde contains the Staff of Overpowered Players. But, to keep a good story according to traditional rules, I want to take away what I've just given them. So I send in a Giant Who-Knows-What, it paralyzes the players and takes the Staff.
Is this good storytelling? Is this good game design? From the mechanical brief that I just used as an example, certainly not. It's terrible game design. What if the players resist the paralysis? Story ruined. What if they teleport out of the dungeon just in time? Story ruined. Heck, what if they just use the staff? Story ruined, game design unbalanced.
So how do game designers and writers use this push and pull of desire, expectation, and consequence effectively?
In a pen and paper setting, this is a little easier. Maybe the staff turns out to be a fake. Maybe the Giant Who-Knows-What focuses all its attacks on the staff and shatters it. Pen and paper GMs can react to these situations much more nimbly and creatively than a video game.
Situations like these are why cutscenes happen. We don't want to give the player the chance to screw up the plot point, so we take control away. Or - and I've done this in D&D - we make the obstacles too great for the player to have a chance. The Giant Who-Knows-What is actually the final boss and there's no way the players can resist its paralysis... It monologues for a while about why it wants the staff even though it's not a player... Then it knocks them out and they wake up in the Old Man's Hut...
Anyway. Neither of these are that great of options. As of this moment, I don't have any great ideas on how to fix it, either. Can you think of any games where this was done especially well?
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