The ending feels like something that the player chose-and something that was chosen rightly. When the interactive storyteller’s magic is executed well, the spellbound player emerges satisfied. In the context of interactive narrative, this allows the player to become the protagonist even though the storyteller has defined the interactions so that all of the choices draw the player toward the storyteller’s desired conclusion. In an interactive story, narrative magic, like stage magic, depends on drawing the audience into the illusion as a participant: the volunteer must be allowed to choose, but the choices must produce the outcome that the magician wants. Players should want to make the choices that take them down the right path and should believe that the outcomes of choices are logical and reasonable. The art lies in making these constraints feel natural. A narrative game therefore requires constrained choices: the player is allowed to choose but is kept from wandering too far from the developer’s desired path. As a game developer, however, you cannot afford to give the player too many choices or allow each choice to branch out too much, or development costs will grow out of control. The appeal of a narrative game lies in the player’s freedom to pick his or her path forward-as in a child’s choose-your-own-adventure book, but with fewer dead ends. When done well, narrative games present players with a host of ethical, tactical, social, and other dilemmas not totally unlike the choices that a decision maker faces in a legal case. Working as a lawyer and a game designer at the same time, I found the parallels between the two roles inescapable. At the heart of all of these projects was an interactive narrative, in which the player was an active participant in rich, thematic stories. After I became a lawyer, I pursued my own game projects, which to my pleasant surprise found a large and enthusiastic audience. By college and law school, I was working nights as a freelance writer for various computer game companies. I fell into making games and never fell out. In the mid-1980s, my grandfather, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineer, gave my brother and me a computer and taught us how to program it. The act of storytelling is, for me, not only a professional necessity but a passionate hobby: I’ve spent my life writing fiction, screenplays, and especially video game stories. To bring that story to a desired conclusion requires persuading the audience to choose the path that the storyteller prefers. Said another way, lawyers, or video game writers, act as storytellers for a story that is still unfolding. And each choice changes the trajectory of the story. But the audience in a legal dispute or a video game is not passive. The author of a book or screenplay decides how the story proceeds the audience’s only job is to read and watch. Interactive stories are fluid precisely because the audience is active. Law and Video Games: Interactive Narratives Examining the parallels can help us hone our legal advocacy. To effectively tell this kind of interactive story, in which the audience is also the protagonist, an advocate employs similar techniques to those used to tell interactive stories in a totally different medium: video games. Because their decisions drive the story’s course and resolve its conflict, the purpose of the story is to give those decisions a context that leads inexorably to the resolution that the advocate wants. The decision makers’ act of deciding takes them from outside the story to inside it. In this article, I propose that the best protagonist of a legal story is the decision maker: the panel, judge, or jury. And it needs a protagonist.īut who is the protagonist? For many years, the advice I received was that sometimes the protagonist is one’s client (in a traditional heroic story) and sometimes the party on the other side (in an antiheroic story). The tale needs a compelling beginning, a satisfying ending, and a logical through line running between them. Like all storytellers, litigators must take the chaotic, tedious, confusing material of life and weave it into a tale well told-thematic, exciting, and clear. It is by now a familiar adage that an effective litigator must be a skillful storyteller.
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