The Half-Cinderella: Why Gameplay never leaves the Ball

Aug 052011

So I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on the shapes of stories again, and it occurred to me that the ludonarrative* arc of most games is good at going up on the Good/Ill Fortune graph, but very bad at going down it. In fact, most ludonarratives are a cut-down version of the Cinderella story that ends at 11:59pm.

*I’m using ludonarrative here to mean ‘the gameplay story’, though I’m not 100% sure it’s the right usage.

Bear with me a moment as I explain exactly what all that means and why it matters, right after I get (buy) a beautiful dress (a sword wider than my body) from my fairy godmother (the blacksmith)…

Let’s begin by talking about the ludonarrative arc in terms of Vonnegut’s Good/Ill fortune graph*.

*If you haven’t watched the video, you’ll need to in order to understand this post. It’s really rather good.

In this case, we’re tracking the good or ill fortune of the player character as determined by gameplay alone: so looking at how the player’s gameplay experience changes with no reference to writing, lighting, sound or other components of the directed narrative. Suddenly, placing good and ill fortune stories is really quite easy: good fortune is when your gameplay becomes enriched: you have more stuff, do more damage, have beefier stats. Ill fortune is the opposite: you have less equipment, do less damage, and are generally less able to kick serious butt.

So what does your average game do with the Good/Ill Fortune ludonarrative graph? They, like the story of Cinderella, start somewhere between low to average on the scale, and then staircase upwards as the player gets better. And better. And better. And at some point the staircase becomes a Staircase to Heaven (sorry, couldn’t resist) as the player becomes God-like, and then they kill the other (notably more evil) God-like entity. And then the game ends.

Midnight strikes and your gravity gun turns back into a pumpkin, but the player is long gone. Or the pumpkin can throw both people and objects around, making you more powerful than ever before.

So I should probably say this now: I am, by no means, talking about all games. In fact, I can fairly safely say that this is a phenomenon generally reserved for action games (whether they’re FPS, RPG or otherwise). It should also be said that games aren’t incapable of Ill fortune: Bioshock had a (short-lived) point where your powers were on the fritz and quite a few RPGs rob you of all your equipment at some point (though by that point, your stats are usually at the stage that it’s a fairly small step down).

Why does this matter? In general, it matters because games are a storytelling medium, whether that story be the one the designer puts there or the one that the player creates through the game’s algorithmic structure. In either case, we want to make the best stories possible.

The Half-Cinderella (as I’ll now call this ludonarrative structure) poses two main problems to our storytelling efforts. First, the ludonarrative is far less effective without a drop in fortune (“everything was going to hell but then I somehow pulled it out of the fire” is so much more compelling than “then I won because I had slowly built up to having the best stuff in the game”). Secondly, it means that all ludic stories are the same story. While stories in other media are rather formulaic, there is at least a distinct difference between “man in a hole”, “boy meets girl” and “cinderella” (and there are far more story types). When was the last time that you started playing a game and your character became steadily worse before getting better again (a.k.a ‘man in a hole’)?

Both these problems are symptomatic of a larger issue: that designers don’t like to punish the player. Games are centred around the idea of rewarding the player for playing well, and there is therefore a feeling that if you make the player character worse, you’re punishing the player and they’ll stop playing. Yet nothing says that the player can’t be rewarded through other means: story elements, sound and graphics, to name a few. And nothing says that reduced characteristics break the difficulty curve or make the gameplay less interesting: by introducing more constraints, the player is required to create new strategies.

In fact, the very idea that, as a player, I need to be constantly hand-fed bigger and shinier features to want to keep playing is a little insulting. I want to be challenged through loss as much as I am through gain, and I want my stories to be complete.

This thought just came to me in the last day or two, and so I’d love to hear some other players’ and devs’ opinions on the issue. Have you guys experienced the Half-Cinderella? Do you think it’s actually a problem? Particularly, I’d love to hear any examples of games which either complete the Cinderella or have a completely different ludonarrative structure (mostly coz I’d love to play them).

Igor Sarzyński

Very good point.

For it work however, You’d need an experienced, mature audience. One that would really be rewarded with what You named: story, graphics, audio, maybe an item of a huge sentimental value and not new powers and +1000 swords. And here lies the problem: even though the avarege age of gamer is what, 34, mentally it’s still mostly elementary school. Bigger, better gun is the best reward a 11-year old can get; not being weak and incapable.

I like the point “by introducing more constraints, the player is required to create new strategies”. How challenging would be a strategy shift mid-way through game? Also, it would work well for all audiences – these who care more about the story (dramatic effect) and these, who care more about the power fantasy (adapt, gain power again, maybe a different kind of power this time).

I need to chew on that a bit more, quite a mind-rpovoking issue. Thanks for the post.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

Thanks for the feedback – glad you found it interesting!

The maturity issue is a really important one: most games are a power fantasy, and players are used to treating them that way. However, I feel there is enough maturity in gamers out there that intelligent use of ludonarrative would be well received. I don’t really have anything to back that up, so it’s a fair bit of conjecture.

Though as you say, those who are looking for the power fantasy would probably welcome a well designed drop: it would create an opportunity for them to hone core skills, and therefore they’ll be even more powerful when we give them their stuff back.

http://twitter.com/Jogosity Jonathan Evans

Interesting points (and anything with Kurt Vonnegut in it makes Friday so much better.)

Here is my thought,
Most games do follow the Man in a Hole construct, but in a much more cyclical way than a traditional linear story. In fact I would posit that all (or at the very least many…) games pursue a far more repeated cycle of intensity/calm/loss/success than films and often novels do. Games play each of these cards repeatedly through a whole game or even a single level; whilst books and movies ( and other traditional narrative forms) tend to only take the audience through one complete cycle.
Think of it this way, it’s easy to find oneself in a “Hole” by dint of changes in the game environment even though you’ve just picked up an even shiner sawn-off-chain-plasma grenade-rottweiler. In an action game this can be propelled by level design and high pressure assaults and even tougher enemies where no matter how skilled or well equipped you are, you are still in a lot of trouble. (Narrative driven games often emphasise this play with narrative techniques – “a desperate defence before final escape” and so on..)
Similarly RPG’s often drop you in a Hole every time you reach a new area and find that the locals are already a big step above your feeble Pixie-Dust techniques, the cycle of toughening up begins again.

I would propose that it is this multi-cyclical nature of narrative arc that is one of the key differentiators between game narratives and passive narratives.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

Some really good points there. I agree that games do follow this cyclical nature (it’s why I tend to prefer to compare games to TV shows than to film, as at least the structure is comparable), and the mission-internal ‘man-in-hole’ structures are probably enough for the level-by-level narrative (I hope there’s more variety there than the one story though). I agree that using tougher enemies and environment to create these holes work pretty well for this structure (you can only take things away from the player so many times before it gets old, and things like a lack of ammo can be great for limiting player abilities).

However, in the same way that having episodes in a TV show doesn’t preclude a season-long arc, having this level-by-level arcs don’t preclude games from having game-wide ludonarrative arcs. In fact, games are probably better suited to ‘serialisation’, as there’s almost no chance that a player will turn up halfway through the game (which is the main reason that TV shows shy away from this). This means creating larger, overarching dynamics alongside the lower-level, mission-based ups and downs.

The question then becomes whether the large-scale gameplay story is useful to pursue. In my opinion they are, as they’d create an extra layer of immersion for the player to become involved with.

http://twitter.com/Jogosity Jonathan Evans

The larger Meta-story is definitely important and can certainly inform the context of the action.

Here’s another thought,

Traditional single cycle story arcs play poorly in games because games are MUCH longer experiences and playing a quarter of a 24 hour game under the cosh may be very off putting, whereas we can handle that 20 minutes of pressure in a movie.
Casting this cosh into a gameplay framework we also encounter potential trouble. Imagine playing 6 hours of a 24 hour action game armed only with a pen-knife, but still facing tanks and Giant Robot Zombie Men. Suddenly the game is entirely different in nature to the one you signed up for – and you may start to lose people. Just as the people watching the action movie may get turned off by a whole act of Rom-Com.
It’s a sort of psychology bandwidth problem.

NOW… it gets interesting.

Turn your 24 hour game into a more modern length – what are we talking 8 to 10 hours? Suddenly that single cycle arc is starting to creep over the horizon in a meaningful way. Who knows where this can end up, but the shifting sands of the current game scene are opening up lots of opportunities.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

That’s a very good point, and it’s one which is confirmed by what we see in TV shows (i can almost hear the groans of ‘oh, he’s comparing games to another medium and ludic story to narrative’, but again I’m looking at this from a purely structural angle). 20-24 episode shows often struggle more with serialisation than 10-13 episode ones for precisely the reason you’ve outlined: you end up with highs and lows that are sustained too long to work both at the episodic level and the season-arc level.

In response to this issue, you usually see one of two approaches: either a serialised story with a hell of a lot of disconnected, episodic content; or a season split into distinct chunks which are of a more manageable size (I’m specifically thinking of 24 here, where the two 12-episode arcs are pretty clearly separated).

What we might find is that for the 20+ hour games, we need to break them into 8-10 hour chunks and work with those. As you say, we’re just entering this era of shorter cycle games, so it’s hard to say without actually designing a 20+ hour game in this way…

Mauro Braunstein

“In either case, we want to make the best stories possible.”

Is that actually true? When I play a game, I’m looking to explore a world and do all of the stuff I can do in it. The problem with this storytelling model is that when I play an RPG, I identify with my character. My party, rather. These are *my* guys, and when I unlock their powers or obtain boosting items, *my* guys can do more stuff. If we wanted to go on the downward slant of my game’s Cinderella story, it would be like getting my girlfriend to leave me — here’s someone I like being with, and now she’s gone because she became a pumpkin. That might make for good storytelling, but it’s not necessarily good gaming, and if I’m playing a game, the gaming experience is the most important.

Of course, FF7 comes to mind, specifically, Aeris’s death. That’s more than just a twist or turn in the story, because when Aeris dies, you don’t get her powers anymore, permanently. Stuff you could have done before, with her around, you can no longer do. It’s a good thing Vincent or Barrett or Cid won’t disappear permanently on me, too, because I’ve spent the whole game building them up! My efforts will have been wasted if they disappear. *My* efforts, not some *character’s* efforts. You see? When my character loses something, *I* lose that something. On the other hand, FF6 has *all* your characters disappear, and you can bring them back over the course of the second half of the game. This way, I don’t lose anything permanently, so all the effort I put in before stays there. What’s the difference? Well, I know what happens to Aeris, and therefore I know not to worry too much about building her up — not to spend any Sources on her, for example — because she disappears and all my effort is wasted. When the downward turn is predictable, its effects are mitigated because I know where to concentrate my efforts and what I can expect from them.

It’s also worth noting that, over the course of a game, enemies will often get stronger and more difficult. The player’s buying the newest equipment is just to keep up with this. On absolute terms, the player’s fortunes keep going up, but in relative terms, that’s not necessarily happening. It’s possible to overlevel, in some games, but in others, there might be a level cap that the player reaches, and enemies are challenging even for players at that cap — FF8 comes to mind, with the monsters leveling up along with the player so that a Red Dragon is challenging even at lv. 100. This way, you, the player, are rewarded for your efforts, but the game isn’t any easier for you because of it.
http://twitter.com/Slickriptide Scott Schultz

Interesting. I’ll have to look at the source material in the links.

It IS possible to tell a story in which you lose for awhile and then recover. For example, City of Heroes, a superhero MMO, has a storyline early in your character’s career in which you discover that one of the game’s Arch-villains is apparently causing a disease to be spread around the city. At a certain point while investigating this, your character contracts the disease and has her stats reduce a small amount, reducing her effectiveness. Your character recovers the vaccine, and so cures the disease and then goes on to battle the Arch-villain and conclude the story arc.

Now, two things are worth noting.

The first is that acquiring the disease happens in the context of the story and it makes perfect sense as a temporary penalty that ends up spicing up the story and giving your character a little bit of a challenge. In point of fact, if you play through the story with a team instead of solo, then the penalty is not even relevant to completing the story arc, so there is always an “out” in case you just don’t like dealing with that.

The second is that City of Heroes is very much about the looks of your character. The chapter of the story in which you acquire the disease, you also acquire an “aura” that accompanies it that looks like you are surrounded by flies (*yew*). Now, in a back-handed way, this turns out to be a kind of reward in exchange for accepting the penalty of the disease because it temporarily made your character look unique in comparison to anyone else. It was not at all uncommon in the early days of the game for people to deliberately seek out that story arc and acquire the disease so that they could then stand around in the open and show off their grungy flies. Heh.

The point being that it’s possible to write in a penalty to performance as described in the article while still creating some kind of reward system that gives players a different kind of reason to accept the penalty and play through the story in spite of it.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

That’s a great example, and I love the idea of using player identity and customisation as a reward to offset a loss in fidelity.

In fact, now that I think about it, that’s kinda what happens at the start of Mass Effect 2. You’re told that you’re gonna use your own save file, so you probably have some expectation that the skills and attributes from the first game are going to carry on in the second. They throw you into an immediate drop by destroying the Normandy and having Shepard essentially die, but ‘make up for it’ by letting you remake Shepard in whatever way you’d like.

http://twitter.com/mcclure111 mcc

A structure modern games seem to like is having you start out super overpowered and with all the power-ups you’ll have at the very end of the game, let you play for one level, then either “flash back” or depower you or something and all of a sudden you’re level 1 and killing sheep. I think this is to keep you engaged and have something to look forward to even though you don’t get all those power ups back for a good six hours.

It doesn’t wind up working very well though from a gameplay perspective, because you quickly realize what they’re doing is dangling in front of you “this is the fun part of the game! And we know that. But we’re not going to let you play it. GO KILL GOATS.”

Someone mentioned the FF games. Actually, FF4 has a great solution to this problem by the cyclical thing whereby people leave, then rejoin your party. Cecil continues to grow steadily throughout the game (thus alleviating the frustrating nature of “depowering”) but the game continually gives you both a rising and falling “story arc”, as well as repeated cycles of growing a character from nothing, in the way that you’re handed new, slightly-underpowered party members to level up again. Later FF games like FF6/FF7/FF8 don’t get to do this though except near the very beginning since they’re more like most modern RPGs seem to be in terms of going very far in letting you “customize” your character. Since by the time you get any distance into one of the later FF games you can customize your party basically any way you like, swapping out characters and altering those characters’ attributes heavily, the game has taken away from itself the ability to take away characters as a way of managing the game’s tempo.

One random thing. I think the problem might be easier with simpler types of games. My one successful attempt at making a game, I wound up with a structure to the game I was pretty happy with. The game was a simple, linear puzzle platformer with no character progression, no explicit story and no character powers. The only things I was able to vary were the difficulty of the levels and the different mechanics present in the environments you interact with. I did a continuous thing throughout the game where the difficulty would climb linearly until single very difficult challenge levels, then drop precipitously and give you a few kind of breezy levels that were “fun to play” but not challenging. Usually the breezy levels would correspond to new mechanics being introduced and serve as a “tutorial” of sorts for the new mechanic. I think this worked because I did have people later commenting that they noticed it was like every time the game gave you a really intense challenge it would then choose to give you a little break for a while. This structure of course wasn’t unique to my game, it’s *extremely* common to puzzle games (puzzle-oriented games like to introduce concepts one by one throughout the game, then follow the introduction of each new concept with a set of puzzles based around it; the introduction of a new concept will usually be like a “tutorial” and therefore be pretty easy, and the following puzzles will be increasingly difficult until it’s time to move to a new concept and get easy again). And of course if you look at old 2D platformers and similar such games with antiquated structure you’ll sometimes find a similar jagged-stairstep difficulty to them, gameplay split up into stages which internally increase in difficulty followed by a “boss”, then at the start of the next level the game is easier than it was at the end of the last one. These kinds of games usually have very explicit highs and lows to them. I think this is the large version of the problem I mention with the FF series– as you introduce “modern” and seemingly desirable aspects to gameplay, like character customization or nonlinearity (or quicksaves, if you think about it) you rob the game designer of the ability to impose an arc or a particular structure on how the player experiences the game.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

Some excellent points re the ‘early drop’ – I think it really depends on how shiny your powers are at the end as to how much it annoys you (I’d love a scenario where as you make your way back up, you realise that the shiny powers you thought you had were the tip of the iceberg, and the only difference is the player skills you’ve gained by playing the game… but that’s an experiment for another day).

The Final Fantasy solution is an interesting one (I’ve never been enough of a fan of the games to get through one of them): it sounds like more of a rolling waves kind of structure, where the waves are getting higher and higher (as you’re own base level increases), but the user’s power is still going up and down.

On the simpler games issue: definitely, this sort of thing is far easier to try there, simply because of the number of moving parts. Creating a drop in a complex game has subtle impacts on thousands of other mechanics, while in a simple game, you can work on a deeper level with the few mechanics that you have.

A small nitpick: when you’re talking about the difficulty curves, it’s *almost* the inverse of the good/ill fortune graph. Inverse, because high difficulty means ill fortune (and so what you’re describing is more of a ‘man in a hole’ graph), and *almost* because I’m looking at the player’s perception of their own power rather than the difficulty of the game. It’s a fairly semantic difference (as their intrinsically linked concepts – a character’s power is linked to his environment), but I feel it’s an important one, since you can separate the two to an extent (you can make the game more difficult without making the player feel less powerful: in fact, by the careful use of powerups, you can make the game more difficult while making the player feel more powerful).
This isn’t to take away from the points you did make at all – using a ‘break’ after challenges is, IMO, vital to good game design, and I love games that do that (there’s also a question of whether the boss should actually be harder than the level preceding it – that’s for another post though). I just wanted to clarify.

http://profiles.google.com/johnevanscs John Evans

I had an idea for a game about a warrior who joined a society of martial arts monks; he swore oaths of nonviolence and eventually became elderly and somewhat infirm, circumstances that made it more difficult for the player.

http://twitter.com/mcclure111 mcc

I’ve wound up in conversations a few times (and there was a long interesting thread recently on TigSource) about the idea of a “reverse metroidvania”– an exploration game or some such where rather than gaining power ups that give you new abilities as you proceed, your abilities are taken away one by one as the game continues.

This would invert the structure of a metroid-alike; whereas in a normal metroid-alike power upgrades guide the game structure in that each new power you get opens up the next area you’re to visit, here the power downgrades would guide the structure in that losing abilities one by one would cause the game to increase in difficulty over time (incidentally freeing you from having to scale the difficulty of *enemies* with time) and force you to take paths you wouldn’t have had to if you were still as powerful as you were at the start of the game.

This is an idea that seems to fascinate a lot of people but I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen it seriously attempted.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

I’ve had this thought myself, and it’s something I may attempt sometime after the next Ludum Dare (I need to shore up my knowledge in some libraries and want to keep the actual coding work to a minimum while we’re working on Particulars, but don’t want to rush it over a weekend). Can you link me to that thread? I’d love to have a look at that…

http://twitter.com/mcclure111 mcc

This is the thread I was thinking of. It’s shorter than I remembered but I don’t think it was the first thread of its type. I have some comments on page 2.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=19744.0

http://twitter.com/mcclure111 mcc

I’ve wound up in conversations a few times (and there was a long interesting thread recently on TigSource) about the idea of a “reverse metroidvania”– an exploration game or some such where rather than gaining power ups that give you new abilities as you proceed, your abilities are taken away one by one as the game continues.

This would invert the structure of a metroid-alike; whereas in a normal metroid-alike power upgrades guide the game structure in that each new power you get opens up the next area you’re to visit, here the power downgrades would guide the structure in that losing abilities one by one would cause the game to increase in difficulty over time (incidentally freeing you from having to scale the difficulty of *enemies* with time) and force you to take paths you wouldn’t have had to if you were still as powerful as you were at the start of the game.

This is an idea that seems to fascinate a lot of people but I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen it seriously attempted.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Emma-Fitzgerald/724201058 Emma Fitzgerald

I can think of a few examples of games that haven’t entirely followed this structure. Lately I’ve been playing Prototype and it breaks the structure in two ways. Firstly, it does the whole “Here is a level of you with all your abilities you’ll have by the end of the game”, then takes you back to the start where you have few powers available to you. But there is also a point in the game where (spoilers) an enemy hits you with a syringe that modifies the virus that is giving you your powers, and you lose some of them. Specifically, you lose your fighting-type powers, but still have all your movement-type powers. So it forces a new style of gameplay where you have to focus more on running and hiding and avoiding enemies than just killing and eating them.

Another game that doesn’t follow the idea of constantly powering up is Left 4 Dead. Ok, it doesn’t have *that* much of a story, but each campaign does have a narrative that you follow, and in L4D2 there is an over-arcing story through all the campaigns as well. However, there’s really no powering up at all. The only thing that powers you up is that at the start of most campaigns, you get a tier 1 or melee/pistol weapon only, and later you find a tier 2 weapon like an assault rifle or something. This does make a difference, but it only happens once and usually not too far from the start. For the rest of the time, your resources are constantly depleting. You are running out of ammo, you are losing health (which makes you slower), once you use your throwables (molotovs, etc) they are gone. There are points through each level where you find new ammo, items and health packs but they are limited and typically don’t have enough items to equip the whole party. And when you die, you start back with a basic weapon and no health pack again. Each time you reach a safe room, you ‘power up’ by renewing your resources, but all it really does is bring you back to the level you were at when you started or sometimes not even that far. Meanwhile, the actual levels get more challenging.

I guess the difference with something like L4D is that it’s a horror game and horror partly works by making the protagonist feel powerless and under-resourced. So powering-up isn’t handed out nearly as readily as in other genres because if it were it would break the tone.

Another example would be Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mostly it follows the half-Cinderella thing but there is the part where you are turned into a wolf and stuck that way for quite a while, losing your horse and the skills you’d just learnt (like hitting things with your sword). Divinity II does a similar thing – at some point, you gain the ability to turn into a dragon. Meanwhile, you’ve spent ages levelling up and equipping your human form, but your dragon form has hardly any skills and equipment, so it kind of feels underpowered compared to the bits where you’re being a human. But it’s definitely rewarding the player anyway, because you’re a _dragon_. So I guess one way of making the player lose some power while still rewarding them is to switch to an entirely new type of gameplay for a while, and they have to then build up that kind of gameplay while losing access (temporarily) to the progress they’d already made.

http://www.facebook.com/pdyxs Paul Sztajer

Those are some good examples: I find L4D particularly interesting: as a co-op game it is an interesting hybrid of a single player cinderella approach of giving you better and better equipment and a deathmatch game where the graph is a bit of a plateu, with any ups and downs being completely generated by the players themselves. It’s also a good example of horror games’ use of a lack of ammo to slowly drag you downward: this creates a ‘man in a hole’ dynamic (though there’s a sharp upturn rather than a steady incline at the end when you win).

In terms of Zelda and Divinity: these are definitely drops, but the almost ‘sideways’ nature of changing into something else adds a new element to the whole argument. I’m interested if you felt as if these alterations create a completely new type of gameplay, or if they simply reinforce the core gameplay in a different way. I’d argue that the former won’t work nearly as well, simply because the player won’t be able to transfer new skills and strategies into their gameplay once they change back.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Emma-Fitzgerald/724201058 Emma Fitzgerald

I think in both cases it was essentially a new type of gameplay but the skills stayed useful because you could later switch back and forth. In fact, to deal with some situations, you need both or you can’t succeed.

Scott Redig

I think a great example of a game which follows “boy meets girl” structure is Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
(Massive spoilers follow)

The game starts out on a rainy night with the princess calling out, and your father goes to investigate. You shortly find that he is unable to rescue Zelda, and you take his sword and shield, and don’t see him again till the end credits. You rescue the princess and successively hide her. Then you go on a quest to gain three pendants used to unlock the master sword, to prevent Ganon from coming. As you get the master sword, Zelda is found and captured. You go to the castle to rescue her (the initial high point), and just as you reach her, she is sacrificed to unlock the portal to the dark world (the downword spiral.) You then must go through the dark world rescuing the sacrificed princesses until eventually you defeat Ganon and claim the triforce.
l
I think this is an example of a great strategy for making a more interesting game. Your character never actually loses power, however the enemy has a great victory and your relative power decreases. It creates a much more interesting plot, and the point where you start your quest in the dark world is considered by many to be their favorite part the first time they played LTTP.
FNORD

1) Game narratives generally don’t follow a simple, one-iteration version of the story shapes, for the simple reason that they’re long. This is hardly unique to games; long works of non-interactive fiction also have multiple up/down cycles on the good fortune/ill fortune access. Take a look at the shape of The Odyssey, as the first example that comes to mind.

2) Focusing solely on the player’s capabilities, the presence of torso-width swords, etc, is too simplistic, almost to the point of being backwards. Cinderella’s fortunes aren’t rising specifically because she’s receiving gowns, etc, they’re rising because she’s going to the ball. By and large, good and ill-fortune are the result of changes of extrinsic circumstances, not intrinsic characteristics. The ups and downs in the “Boy gets Girl” archetype are caused by the boy’s relationship with the girl, not anything inherent in the boy; the “Man in the Hole” is about the hole. In games, the role of the environment and the antagonist(s) are AT LEAST as important as the player’s capabilities. You should look to those FIRST for establishing good and ill fortune.

This goes both ways. Note that all his stories end on an up curve; this still exists in games where constant resource depletion is the rule. Consider chess: the capabilities of a player are in constant decline (at least after the opening, and barring the relatively rare pawn-promotion), but for the winner their fortune still ends on an up curve, because their relative position is improving until an eventual victory.

3) The importance of the environment is especially salient if you’re not talking about extra capabilities, just extra power. Is the any difference, effects-wise, between doing half as much damage to the same enemies versus twice as much damage to enemies four times as tough? No.

So why not decrease damage, then, to create ill-fortune? Because stories are about more than just the shape of the good/ill fortune curve. Quite often, they’re about growth, especially if they fit in the monomyth/hero’s journey archetype that lends itself to high-action stories. And having prolonged periods of reduced strength runs the risk of undercutting the sense of growth. It’s not guaranteed, but it certainly increases the story-telling challenge.

4) It’s well and good to say “challenge by constraint” in theory. It even works well in some circumstances (I mentioned chess above).

However, there are practical reasons that it is difficult to do. Games of the sort you’re talking about (computer-based action games) have the odd combination of generally not providing a broad spectrum of choices but still requiring a significant learning curve required to effectively make the choices available. Why this is a beyond the scope of this discussion, but truly getting away from it would be a very hard problem.

As a result, you can’t front-load choices and allow constraint to arise over gradually over the course of the game, the way it would work in chess or go, since you risk players being overwhelmed. And you have to be very careful about reducing choices mid-stream, given the limitations of the medium, lest you create tedium and/or a feeling of arbitrary restraint.
http://goodbadawesome.blogspot.com Stephen Winson

Another example is the Undead campaign in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. Arthas starts out at level 10 and slowly loses levels until he’s level 1 at the final level. It’s not a huge gameplay penalty, since your other Hero units can level and you’ve got an army of minions, but it’s what drives the story forward.
http://www.facebook.com/pavel.liskin Pavel Liskin

I feel the Cinderella concept is unfortunately far too creative for some of the developers that is why Half-Cinderella is so much popular, it is easier to move on with the straight ahead approach than to create the complex story line according to the drama laws, also if the game designer / writer is not very well-educated it will hit the Cinderella idea, we have recently released a title that has quite a trivial story telling approach, but I always considered it not to be the competitive advantage, with very limited resources it is extremely important to be able to identify the competitive advantage and if something hits it usually it is better to drop the hitter, I really consider the ‘Defcon’ to be a great example of dropping the story telling in favor of the gameplay itself – the clear competitive advantage.
Sam Crisp

Sid Meier spoke about this in a section of his 2010 GDC keynote in relation to the Civilization games. He originally wanted to represent the “Rise and Fall” of civilizations. He planned for the player to progress, only to falter and crumble, and then to make a triumphant rise again- echoing what you would perhaps refer to as the “full Cinderella.” However, he found that when play-testing this, players would simply load a previous safe game whenever faced with any meaningful defeat and would never experience the re-rise he had planned for them. So instead, Civilization is about progress, and progress alone. The “half-Cinderella.”

Games are peculiar narrative structures. We actually experience defeat all the time. I’ve died countless times in the same video game. It’s just that this defeat isn’t considered canon. There have been times when I have been stuck on a boss fight, dying to it many times before finally, triumphantly succeeding. For the character in the game, this is instantaneous. He or she has defeated the boss on the first attempt, and all my other attempts have skewed off the Vonnegut graph into alternate realities Doc Brown-style. But for me, those other attempts still exist, as some sort of strange, video game-y abstraction, representing narrative tragedy and defeat. Obviously, there is no real threat of defeat, as you can and will keep reloading that save game until you win.

The idea of Kurt Vonnegut’s narrative arc still applies to video games, but it is the player that is shaping it as they play. The arc will continue to flux indefinitely until the player loses interest and stops playing, or until they finally reach the final peak. In the early days we had the concept of ‘lives’ allowing us to fail only so many times. But this is no different- in order to proceed you have to do the same thing — play it again — just from an earlier checkpoint.