The Narratives in Open World Games

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As I mentioned above, Minecraft only provides some basic rules and it only set a very simple aim to players, such as avoiding being attacked to survive in survival mode and creating whatever you like in creative mode. Things that the developer want to pass to players all expressed by these rules. In survival mode and other two similar ones, the cubes which represent different materials and the mobs in the game world drive players to continue their work. Players interact with the game world to get information and decide what to do next instead of reading hints and obeying the orders. In this case, the actions in Minecraft should be regarded as diegetic machine acts according to Galloway’s theory in gamic action (2006)③. Players play in an infinite game world generated by a random seed code, which means it’s almost impossible to generate two same maps unless importing the seed code manually. The map has different ground types, such as plains, forests, ice grounds and deserts. All of these are generated by specific codes and algorithms, thus for players, this procedure seems like a black box. Of course, most players might not mind this, but the game world they care about continue changing as the time pass and also according to the algorithms. Sometimes, players may find some regularity, but in most time, such algorithmic movements are unexpectable for players because codes are hiding inside the software, which to some degree increase the interactivity between the system and players.

Besides the survival mode, the creative mode should be underlined as well. If it is said developers tell stories in most games, in this mode of Minecraft, it could be regarded as the player telling a story with the help of the game. People interact with the game itself in most games, but now they interact with themselves. The developer merely gives some tools and every narrative here is created by players. They build circuits. They construct buildings. They copy the miracles from the real world. For common players, this is an open source world and the only limit is their creativity. It is this creative mode that Minecraft provides unlimited possibilities. In this way, the developer does not need to consider the balance of interactivity and narrative any more. The unlimited possibilities make the interactivity itself become a kind of narrative.

Heroes of Jin Yong & Non-linearity

In 1996, the year that the “sandbox game” is still not so well-known, a Chinese game studio, Heluo Studio, published a game called Heroes of Jin Yong. It is a tactical role-playing game on MS-DOS platform based on the stories and characters in Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels. At that time, when most Chinese products were still limited in the linear narratives, which seems like a cartoon series, Heroes of Jin Yong shew its difference and exquisite design.

With the profit of the spectacular background from Jin Yong’s 14 Wuxia novels, the world in Heroes of Jin Yong had the highest degree of freedom, the most characters, the best design of branches and the widest map discovering among games that made in China in a long time. Even in the global range, its interestingness and gamification were still distinguished at the time it published.

No matter in China, or in anyplace where Chinese people live, such as northeast Asia, west Europe and north America, the name “Jin Yong” is well-known. Jin Yong presented an amazing Chinese “Jianghu” (martial art world) to the global. Millions of fans are loving the hundreds of characters in Jin Yong’s novels, following them to travel across mountains and rivers and experiencing the love and enmity. Based on Jin Yong’s Wuxia world, a subject called “Jin-ology” was developed. Many sociologists and scholars have indicated various special views to the society, characters, hierarchies, morality, traditional cultures and social relationships from Jin Yong’s masterpieces. Heroes of Jin Yong is such a game that combines the famous characters, plots and places from Jin Yong’s 14 novels together, it does not tell a story, but create a most poetic world contains stories for players.

The protagonist is a boy living in modern world and playing the game Heroes of Jin Yong at home, however, he is lucky enough to have the only one special edition that contains a “VR experience”. Then he finds himself inside the Jin Yong’s Wuxia world and is told that he should collect the 14 novels (known as ‘God Books’ in the game world) in order to finish the game and go back to the real world. Under such setting, players now begin their adventure inside the game world. But what is different from other similar role-playing games is players do not have a specific mission tree or story line. All they know is merely to collect the novels. And how? There are no fixed ways. Although there are some characters, such as the customers in restaurants, designed to give the player some hints, most of them are equivocal or profitable. Famous characters and typical sceneries from Jin Yong’s novels distribute in every corner of a huge China’s map (it should be described as “huge” at that generation of MS-DOS). The player could visit and make friends with them. Different people you visit, and then different branches will be triggered. When completing some specific acquirements, the player could invite some characters to join the team and continue the adventure together (most important when fighting, but also some special events, which might offer some precious classics of Kong Fu, need a specific character in the team to trigger out). What’s important, the various branches are woven together, which means every decision might cause a chain of change.

Limited by the technology, everything only change based on what the player has done but what to do next is influenced by the information got from characters. It seems like diegetic, but in fact not. Heroes of Jin Yong should be a non-diegetic operator game. The text conversations, order choices, round combats and items viewing in the bag are “often the very essence of the operator’s experience of gameplay—simple proof that gaming may, even for limited moments, eschew the diegetic completely” (Galloway, 2006)④. Such gamic action allows the game to present a complex branch net, which should be so-called non-linearity, and players could have enough time to think about what to do next. They have the most freedom to travel inside it and to choose what way to go along because anything different many cause a different ending (the ending is fixed, which is either being killed or going back to real world, while how to end the game and how difficult to end the game might be distinct). Such non-linear story line is another important narrative feature of open world games.

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