Viral player stories. When you create games with deep systems, player run into amazing, emergent scenarios on a regular basis. From these moments of player experience grow myths and legends. Players tell them. Press repeats them. Your game goes viral without requiring any of the whirring, queasy machinations of your local social network dealer.
Why does this occur? It happens without prompting. It requires no points, no bribes. It is as if, after the right experience, the urge to tell stories bubbles up innately from inside even the least imaginative human.
A story, at an evolutionary level, is a lesson in success or failure intended to improve the survival rate of the tribe. This is why we create them. This is why we share them. This is why we consume them. Like play, story (even fiction) serves a function. Good stories were at one point a matter of life, death and reproduction. Humans have a nose for truths and when we spot them amidst the maelstrom of daily experience, we instinctively share them.
When we, as game designers, create meaningful systems whose depths are only revealed after a process of deep mastery, players instinctively extract stories from their experiences within these playscapes and pass them on to their friends and family. "When I kicked the soccer ball, my foot slide on the wet grass and I heard a distant sickening crunch in my knee." To experience a unique lesson that you've learned in your bones after a thousand trials is to hold a treasure. And being human, we can't help but share. Over and over and over again [...]
Story as evolutionary success or failure lessons
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