Two essential elements of any good story are conflict and characters. This is true whether that story is delivered by movie, novel, a series of drunk and increasingly belligerent Facebook posts… or through a game.
Finding the conflict in a game story is usually as easy as finding a funny cat video on the Internet. After all, games are all about conflict: players are continually striving against each other (or the game itself) in order to make progress towards winning. (And yes, I said before I’m not talking about tabletop RPGs, but it’s safe to say their stories are driven by conflict as well.) The hard part isn’t finding the game’s conflict, but ensuring that conflict fits into the storyworld in a way that makes sense.
Finding characters, however, might be a bit trickier.
Some games hand you characters to write up and play with. Video games in which players control a single avatar (Lara Croft, Nathan Drake, Gordon Freeman) are great for this, as are adventure board games in which each player gets a character (such as in Talisman, Runebound, or *cough* Steel Dragons). The challenge for these characters isn’t discovering them, but integrating their worlds into the larger storyworld.
More challenging are the games in which the players control whole farms, factions, nations, or galactic civilizations. When your story is about the Russian Android Confederation battling the Psychic Alliance for control of Mars… there is no obvious unique character who’s engaged in the conflict.
That’s where you get to be creative, and put a face to the faceless entity. The best way to do that varies from one game to the next, but here are a few suggestions:
- The Spokesperson: This is the farmer, the emperor, or Lord Chancellor of the Russian Android Confederation. This is the person calling the shots for the player’s organization, and the person whose role the player is playing. The spokesperson is essentially a mascot, literally personifying the organization.
- The Commander: In video games, this is the person who barks orders and explains why we need to explore the northern frontier, develop pottery technology, or shoot all the aliens in the face. Board games don’t usually have an order-giving NPC, but there are places for such characters to deliver backstory and context through flavor and rules text. Unlike the Spokesman, the Commander isn’t an avatar for the player; he’s engaged in a larger story in which the player plays a smaller role.
- The Grunt: At the opposite end of the spectrum from the Commander is the grunt. This character is on the front lines of the conflict, and represents the people and resources the player controls. In video games, we might zoom in on a single unit and get her story as she progresses through the game. In tabletop games, the grunt might be a literal unit on the board, or a representative who shares her story through flavor text and imagery on the game components.
It doesn’t take much to turn these characters into protagonists of the game’s story. You can do a lot with broad stroke of motivation, a hint of backstory, or a couple quotes to establish personality. But with even a little work, you can use them to tell a unique story and serve as guides on a fantastic tour of a game’s storyworld.
