Watching a few films, it strikes me that one of the most important things in books / films is the slow drip of information that comes abpout usually through character interaction. But this is more difficult in a game, because gamers like action and 'doing things' and would get impatient if they had to listen to a whole bunch of situational exposition. Any solutions?

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Original post by Ketchaval Watching a few films, it strikes me that one of the most important things in books / films is the slow drip of information that comes abpout usually through character interaction. But this is more difficult in a game, because gamers like action and 'doing things' and would get impatient if they had to listen to a whole bunch of situational exposition. Any solutions?

RPGs do the same thing alot of the time. They give you 'quests' which when fufilled give you 'new' information about the plot, effectively the same if not exactly the same as books/films.

At least that's my opnion.

I don't see why a slow drip of information would slow down the action of the game or movie for that matter. Games like quake (and some RPG:s for that matter) contain very little information anyway.. you just go from point A to B killing monsters on the way.

On the Fight Club soundtrack, theres a song called "This Is Your Life" which is a three minute speech given from Tyler Durdan. The movie itself, gradually gives you this speech over the course of it's two hours. Slow drip of info is crucial to the best movies. Its about the coming to understand the information in each of it's parts. Getting all of the information all at once would confuse and confound the audience.

Video Games have a lot to learn, but its on a good start. Modern games normally progress from a simple gameplay style, to a more complex means, by way of adding another feature with each stage of the game. That is to say, you learn to jump in stage one, you learn to hover in stage two, you learn to fly in stage three. Convert this logic over to the story, that is break up the chunks of the story where at stage one you learn the shallow info, and then which each new stage (not neccessarily aligned with gameplay stages) we get a little deeper into the story.