After talking about a panel I took part in this year on game mastering, a friend told me about their struggles as an autistic person regarding storytelling. I thought about my own journey with it. I am on the spectrum too, AuDHD, and I remembered that it was never something I felt came naturally to me. I always admired those who seemed to have a knack for spinning a tale. My competence as a game master built very deliberately, and one where storytelling is still an intentional effort despite having developed a decent feel for things in some areas.
What is a story?
And why do we tell them? My own definition:
A story is a way of transmitting experience to an audience who wants to know something about that experience.
At first I thought a story is an answer to a question. Stories exist to give information. But that isn’t really it. There are theories that explain story as a survival adaptation: we’re interested because it might give us data that helps us survive a similar situation. I think that has some merit, but it also rests on “survival adaptation”. This concept bothers me because it encourages the idea that all lifeforms have secret unconscious motives. It puts the cart before the horse. Living things like to do all kinds of things, and the ones who end up reproducing through the course of them doing the things they like to do produce the next generation. Its a subtle distinction, but it helps me to remember that other lifeforms (as well as human) aren’t evolutionary robots.
Stories are useful for survival. But that doesn’t mean that is why we are interested in them. The ones who survived better because of stories weren’t in it for species propagation. I think they were in it because stories let them have experiences, even dangerous ones, and bond with each other, which feels good and increases the feeling of safety. Even a scary story does this. Stories pass along information, build bonds, break them. The uses are immense. At its core, I consider story to be the fundamental magic.
The problem for direct communicators
For those of us whose communication style jumps to the end: My tire was flat and I was on the road for hours, and now I am back. This is good communication. I really appreciate direct communication and I generally say it’s the way to go. If you need to communicate a thing, say it.
But a story doesn’t start with the end. We hide the end for later. It’s the payoff for listening. The communication is indirect. And that’s the part the direct version misses: not the information, but the experience.
What is a story good for?
Direct communication is the right tool when
you need convey hard data. Storytelling is the technique you use when the thing you need to transmit is experience rather than facts.
Story is not just about answering a question, its about conveying an experience to another person. The reason we don’t give the payoff first is that we need to take the other person’s brain on a journey, and brains are annoying and don’t operate the way we consciously tell them to. They have their own thing going on.
Managing annoying brains
There was a book I really loved when studying art: Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain she describes the left hemisphere as analytical, verbal, and logical, representing the world with simplified icons learned around age two or three. Think “cup” and what do you see? An icon of a cup, most likely. Ask someone who never got past the barriers we put up around art to draw one, and that icon is about all they can produce. The right hemisphere, in her account, is experiential, sensory, direct, present. It’s what you draw with.
The neuroscience here is shakier than the book made it sound (the strict hemisphere split doesn’t hold up as a description of how brains are actually organized), but if you’ll indulge me with this model: Experience brain (the ‘right’ brain in the book) is experiential, sensory, direct, and very present. It is also what you use when drawing. Efficient brain wants shortcuts and easy answers and minimized energy expenditures. It is glad to have a less rich option. And honestly its doing a good job. But the problem is that it tends to run the show, and if you are curious about an experience someone had, and they tell you the “ending”, then the logic brain says DONE! NEXT!, and the experience brain feels let down, and conversation stalls out.
So what does that mean for those of us who value directness? To convey an experience, we have to withhold information from the efficient brain so the experiential part can absorb enough so that we can have an immersive experience.
Game plan to prevent efficient brain takeover … aka …
The Basic Structure for Storytelling
Here’s the process I use to keep the eager, efficient part sitting still long enough to tell a story. This is the heart of “How do I keep people interested?” because in this framing, that question is really “How do I stop the shortcut-seeking part of a listener from deciding it’s wasting its time?”
Plot Hooks / The Want / The Question
A plot hook is the thing that gets the audience wanting more. With a friend, the hook is usually easy: tell them you had an experience, but only a teaser. “I had a terrible night.” “I just got back from a huge trip.” “Did I tell you about x?” The hook is the tool you use to establish the Want. But interest isn’t enough. Internally, you need to know two things: that you are promising to tell them about the thing they’re interested in, and what question is now sitting in their mind: the one that, when answered, satisfies both the curiosity and the need for a conclusion.
Referring to the definition I typed earlier:
A story is a way of transmitting experience to an audience who wants to know something about that experience.
The Journey
Here you provide the experience that leads to the answer. This is the transmission. Think of it as direct communication achieved by indirect means, whose purpose is to hold the shortcut-seeking part still long enough that the other person can feel what it was like to be there.
Answer to the Question
The payoff. The punchline. The ending. It only lands if the question was properly planted at the start.
Game Mastering
In order for people to pay attention to the game, you need the same functions to keep them interested.
The Game Hook & The Spotlight
This is the part I think about more than any other piece of a game’s structure. It’s the engine that lets the whole thing run reliably. The spotlight is what the game is about, and it starts long before session one. It starts when you pitch the game. “This game will be about x.” That pitch is you constructing a Question / Want / Hook at the very beginning of your relationship with your players.
If the game is about a group of adventurers who are uncovering the secrets of the ancient evil worm… then the game hook is that. This question is a really open ended one for a big campaign, but it gives you a lot of information about what the players need in order to play. What you are doing here is giving the people info on what they can expect, and what promise you are making as far as expectations are concerned. Players are giving you their time and attention. You have to deliver on that if you want the game to be satisfying.
There is a flip-side to that exchange.
The Spotlight
You do not have to tell a story that you do not want to tell.
At this point, the game master has many expectations placed upon them, but the players do as well. Players are expected to play characters who would logically be part of this story, and the spotlight is where the time and energy of the game goes because that was the agreement which happened in the game hook. Its a good idea to spell this out:
you should play a character who will work towards uncovering the secrets of the evil worm and believes that working with this group is the best way to achieve that goal
In other words, you give the players the parameters to which to build their character and shape their experience so that they have the creative freedom to determine their motivations but know what it is that they need to aim at so that the game can stay on track. And if a player begins to leave the spotlight with their character, then you can point it out to them because if they leave the light, the character might continue on, but the story no longer follows them. (They become an NPC under the GM’s control, and are welcome to make a new character)
Its the same way that the GM does not advertise a sci-fi game and then proceed to run a fantasy goblin dungeon crawler: its a good way to lose players and disappoint people.
the remaining I will save for part two, or perhaps make this one longer, haven’t figured that one out yet