Example of nonlinear storytelling to build a mystery

[TheFlatline]

Some time back I posted my ideas that I developed around delivering a mystery story. The idea is that the narrative of what actually happened is developed chronologically, and then chopping the narrative up, associating the bits with logical locations/characters (or throw out bits that would make sense based on where the characters decide to go), and then letting the PCs approach the narrative as they see fit, collecting pieces and assembling them as they go.

I have an excellent real world example of this to point to now in the Interactive Fiction game Her Story. Cost is about 6 or 7 bucks, and is about a woman who is interviewed by police 7 times in 1994. You're going through using an ancient DB which limits your ability to search the video clips, and have to use intuition and deduction to come up with search terms to recover video and assemble what actually happened.

I'll warn people that this is probably the extreme edge of IF games. There's a certain voyeuristic quality to the game and at the end of it all you're basically playing Google: The Game.

But the way you drift through topics, the way you pull clues out of transcripts and monologues, and the way you piece things together are strongly reminiscent of how I ran my mystery campaigns. It's a worthy game to take a look at if you're looking to write and run a mystery as well.

It also addresses a subject that I didn't since it hadn't occurred to me: Editing the clues you give to the players. The clips in Her Story are superbly edited and make you want to keep digging and keep drifting through all these clips. Some of them, due to how we read and process results (left to right) seem to be edited to particularly respond to your state of mind as the researcher (search "sex" for instance and your first clip is the subject getting deeply offended for prying into her personal life.).

I haven't finished the game yet so I can't tell you if the payoff is good, but I can say that it's an excellent example of nonlinear storytelling to create a mystery. It's well written IMHO, and one of the fun parts is to look at a clip, have it click in an "a-ha!" moment, and then lead you down a series of clues until you eventually see another clip that completely changes meaning of the first clip you saw, which might send you off on another tangent to gather more information. It might be beyond most of us to write mysteries with clues that act as signposts to different directions depending on how much information you already have, but if you can do that and give the players reasons to go back over old clues you've given them to see if there's anything *more* that they can squeeze out of them from time to time with fresh understanding, it seems to me to be twice the payoff for a little more work.

[silva]

You mean this ?

[Smeelbo]

You might take a look at a board game called Android. It's kind of reverse Clue, where the player's start with suspects that they get more or fewer victory points if that suspect is fingered, and the player's can make the "clues" incriminate some suspects but not others.

Smeelbo

[TheFlatline]

You mean this ?

Not. Even. Close.

[TheFlatline]

You might take a look at a board game called Android. It's kind of reverse Clue, where the player's start with suspects that they get more or fewer victory points if that suspect is fingered, and the player's can make the "clues" incriminate some suspects but not others.

Smeelbo

I actually do have Android and have played it a few times. I admire it the way I admire a rube goldberg machine. The pure baroque nature of all the whirring sub-components is beautiful. As a practical board game its' a fucking mess.

There was a big argument over at BoardGameGeek about whether you were in character framing your preferred suspect or if you were playing the "director" of the story and jiggering the plot so that your suspect ended up guilty. I argued that once you ask that question, you're done. Much like you're done when you ask "Is Deckard a replicant?" You've hit upon the important question, and going beyond exploring that is not beneficial to the story and the themes.

The best I can explain is imagine that you have a jigsaw puzzle, and all the pieces are in a bag. You draw them out randomly, and at first nothing makes sense and you don't even know how to *sort* the pieces. But sometimes they go together. Or sometimes you get an edge or a corner, and you start to build. Maybe you use your sense of touch to look for corner or edge pieces or a particular piece you need. Maybe you pull it, maybe you pull something else. That's what I'm edging at. Only to pull a puzzle piece you have to figure out an encounter where you're likely to find puzzle pieces and go there and do something.

[Username17]

Android is a weird game. It's certainly interesting, and I had fun playing it. But the story aspect seems to be all wrong. Like, everything in that game seems literally backwards. The way your character's personal growth interacts with the black and white adventure spots seems totally backwards. The way putting the puzzle pieces together for the conspiracy seems totally backwards. The way the evidence collects on the suspects seems totally backwards.

Like, as near as I can tell, in that game you don't actually play "your" character. You're playing one of the conspirators who is planting evidence to try to lead your character into arresting one of the other conspirators.

Android is certainly a game that should be studied from a game design standpoint. But it needs a major revamp or refluff or something to get the actions associated with the mechanics in any way.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Android is a weird game. It's certainly interesting, and I had fun playing it. But the story aspect seems to be all wrong. Like, everything in that game seems literally backwards. The way your character's personal growth interacts with the black and white adventure spots seems totally backwards. The way putting the puzzle pieces together for the conspiracy seems totally backwards. The way the evidence collects on the suspects seems totally backwards.

Like, as near as I can tell, in that game you don't actually play "your" character. You're playing one of the conspirators who is planting evidence to try to lead your character into arresting one of the other conspirators.

Android is certainly a game that should be studied from a game design standpoint. But it needs a major revamp or refluff or something to get the actions associated with the mechanics in any way.

-Username17

I agree it needs a major overhaul for a bunch of different reasons. I think the backwards ambitiousness of the game mechanics where it doesn't feel like you're playing your character was intentional. I suspect though that it ended up being more of a stumbling block than the designer wanted to admit.

The funny thing though is that every time we broke the game out and played it, the individual storylines for all the characters ended up being more interesting than the actual case. And while that's definately a game design flaw, as a genre theme it kind of fits right in with noir/pulp fiction.

The end-game of the game though. Holy fuck the last like half a dozen turns just DRAG.