Publié par ARSENAULT, Dominic, « Dynamic Range: measuring player freedom and its narrative possibilities in resource-driven games », international symposium 5th Symposium on Art and Multimedia: Metanarrative(s)?, Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona, January 28-29, 2005.
It is clear that all games are regulated by procedures, and even that consequently, all games can produce narratives – but not necessarily stories. But all games can definitely not do so equally; how different from one another can one hundred Tetris narratives possibly be? It may be a good idea for a developer to design a game in which there is little or no story because the player is free to create his or her own, but how can he know if his design will contribute to stimulate emergent narratives? By giving the player more freedom, the designer relinquishes narrative construction and leaves the task to the player. If, therefore, we are to evaluate a game’s emergent narrative potential, what we need to do is measure the player’s freedom; the more freedom he is given, the more he can make original, unexpected combinations out of his resources to build narratives. To that end, I will introduce a tool I have developed to measure player freedom in a video game, which I call the Dynamic Range.