Story Delta and Mechanics Vocabulary

This is the letter Delta: Δ. Just in case.

Edit: This entry was originally entitled Story Delta and Mechanics Semantics, but I rather use the term Mechanic Vocabulary instead of Mechanics Semantics. It’s a better way to refer to the idea I was talking about.

If you’ve read the most recent posts of this blog, you should know by now the concept of Story Delta. I mentioned here and here. I will quote myself, because I’m lazy and it makes me feel kind of important:

The designers driven story (or Story-Story, as Valve’s designers call it; Embedded Story as referred by Schreiber) is the usual narrative we identify in games: the plot arcs, characters and dialogues. The players driven story (or Gameplay Story, as Valve’s designers refer to it, Emergent Story as called by Schreiber) is the sequence of actual and specific actions the players take while playing.

Tetris has no designer driven story: there is no narrative whatsoever. This title is what we call a non narrative game. Tetris is totally made of player driven story, you take those little tetris pieces, move and rotate it in specific way until the game finishes somehow. That sequence of actions makes up a story that depends exclusively on the player. On the other hand, a game like Portal has a sequence of actions that conform a plot, with characters and dialogues that are a companion for the player driven story.

The questions that arises are: how different these stories have to be? how much separation between them has to exist, or how much of it it’s permitted?. Valve’s designers talk about the Story Delta, how much the actions directly driven by the player trigger actions in the designers driven story. Their conclusion is that delta has to be as little as possible in order to engage players.

The sources I pointed out are Valve’s Portal Post-Morten and Ian Schreiber’s Game Design Concepts blog entry.

I wan’t to provide an illustration of what story delta is about and how we can implement it gameplay. Also, I want to introduce the concept that I usually call Mechanics Vocabulary.

If you haven’t played the game, spoilers ahead. This is the example:

Well, the actual example are the first two minutes or so.

The first minute and a half is the hook that connects Half-Life 2: Episode One to the previous installment, Half-Life 2. The next minute is the actual beginning of the game, the section we are going to focus on.

The question I want to answer is: Why is Dog (the robot) the one rescuing Freeman?.

I want you think about this question in terms of its alternative: why isn’t Freeman releasing himself from the debris?, we already know the kind of badassery he is capable of, so, why does he need help in this particular situation?.

Badassery, look at it!.