During our almost weekly call about narrative and life, Nico Saraintaris made a comment about multiple endings that I found interesting to share.
If we want our game to have multiple endings, and to work well, it's not that we multiply the work of one ending by the number of endings.
Instead, there's a compounded effect of work that involves a larger amount (and much larger the more endings we add).
This, for nerds like me, is an example of a complex system where adding a new agent has a non-linear effect.
For non-nerds, let me steal some examples from Nassim Taleb once again: a state is not a big municipality, and a country is not a big state. A human body cannot be explained as a set of atoms.
The properties that emerge from adding elements to a system cannot be explained with the theories that serve for the element.
And that's where I'm currently working, on the line that separates traditional narrative (a story, without interactions) and interactive narrative, with all the new elements that affect the system we know of storytelling.
Many of the problems we see in games today come from not taking this into account, and believing that a narrative game is a story with options that works the same as linear stories.
Nope.
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