Design Pattern: Plot Mechanic

Overview

When the overarching theme of a game is driven by a unique mechanic, the game is using the Plot Mechanic pattern. It is the game design equivalent of a plot device in film and literature. TVTropes defines a plot device as "an object or character in the story whose purpose is purely to drive the plot or resolve situations." A Plot Mechanic is the same idea, but it renders it with gameplay instead of narrative.

Purpose

It may seem that any mechanic of a given game could be considered a Plot Mechanic, since game mechanics are the 'words' of the language of game design, but by that logic everything in a story would be a plot device. Thus, the Plot Mechanic has the same sort of central 'bigness' that a plot device has. It has to represent the agency of the player that facilitates gameplay; summoning demons, controlling time, transforming between different creatures.

Usage

As it is in film and literature, the Plot Mechanic can be a dangerous trap. Like plot devices, Plot Mechanics can come off as boring, stale, or simply lazy. You may find movie tie-ins can suffer from this: a fan-favorite element of the film is turned into a mechanic upon which and the whole enterprise is expected to rest, based solely on how well it sold on the silver screen.

It can be a great place to start, however, and it seems that often that is where we start. How often do we sit down and think, "I want to make a game where X can do Y"? Relying on the Plot Mechanic like this can be good for small games, experiments, and prototypes, but the larger the project the more thought and iteration it will require.

Examples

• The Darkness – The plot mechanic is the name of the game. 'Nough said.
• Braid – You can control and manipulate time in various ways; no one is going to argue this game didn't pull it off brilliantly. In fact, almost all of the mechanics in the entire game have to do with it.
• Banjo Kazooie: – You can flip between the two characters, as I remember, which leads to a whole bunch of great little abilities.

Counter Example

• Chronoscient – Chrono started with the idea by our lead for "a space shooter where you can see the future." Got a lot of cool words in there, and who doesn't love some good time-bending gameplay? But in the end, we found that we simply could not figure out how to get the idea to work. Space shooters are so fast and intense, how do you communicate the future without overloading the player? I think in retrospect, we did not understand that space shooters already gave you information about the future: the swarms of enemies and heavily deterministic behaviors give you all the info you need in order to predict what is going to happen. Maybe when we revisit it, we will be wiser and use the more generic statement "a space shooter where time is a dimension of gameplay".