Strong Structure:
"Stories must satisfy tight structural requirements to be acceptable."
There are fundamental expectations of a story that when you here a certain story you will believe that the tale your listening to isn't a story. - "Lesson #1 Stories are complex structures that must meet hard-to-specify requirements"
People:
In it's most basic form all stories are about people even if a person or people aren't physically mentioned the main part of a story is making it possible for the reader to relate to or understand from the perspective of a person telling the story. For example in itsy-bitsy spider obviously the spider isn't a person but the moral of the story to keep persevering makes the reader relate to the story as if it really is a bout a person persevering up the water spout.
"Lesson #2 Stories are about the most fascinating thing in the universe: people."
Conflict:
All stories have conflict whether that be directly presented as good and evil in white and black or the bad guy looks ugly and horrific where the good guys are handsome admirable characters of which we as the audience would admire to become.
However stories conflict isn't always so direct, for example in Jurassic Park 2, the main conflict is between the business man and the scientist and their different views on how the dinosaurs should be treated, as creatures or as a money making scheme. The dinosaurs appear to be the main conflict but are actually not needed at all in the film as the main point of the story is that the business man should have listened to the scientist because he predicts that the creatures will act on their primal instincts. Basically the dinosaurs actions are natural to their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways, much like if a lion escaped at a zoo and ate someone, a very drastic example but it gets my point across. The film could have been done without the dinosaurs completely but that wouldn't make an interesting film or wouldn't make Spielberg any money.
Puzzles:
"Stories are not puzzles. It's true that puzzles often form a part of the story: indeed, puzzles play a large role in mystery stories." But again the puzzles and story is primarily about the people within them i.e. the Saw movies wouldn't be as good if the traps where made but no one went through them and we just had to figure out how to escape, we follow the people in the story and traps and see how and what they do to escape, the traps needn't be there either they could just get told by Jigsaw what they have done wrong and promise to change, but again this doesn't make compelling films but the puzzles are what gives the people within them the challenges to overcome. Giving the people within the stories something to beat or overcome makes a compelling story again like Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the Spiders puzzle is making it up the water spout, puzzles help make the story compelling by giving the people a challenge.
Plenty of stories do well without puzzles however but puzzles do add to a compelling story and especially game.
"Lesson #3 Puzzles are not a necessary component of Stories"
Choices:
Spectacle:
"Lesson #4 Spectacle does not make stories"
The Tyranny of the Visual:
Similar to the above as the age of technology is upon us and is greatly achieving more and more great things the modern day observers of film, tv and games are so fixated on the epic visual effects, fight scenes and CGI that if a younger modern audience was to watch a black and white film they would find it boring and not be drawn into the film because of the lack of technology, effects and visual pleasure they are used to from modern day technology, so from this we can say that yes you do not need visual pleasure to create a story but in a modern age like today they are needed i believe to make game or film a success as without visual dynamics now only a small minority of people will enjoy, understand and believe it, for example image Transformers with out the CGI, Star Wars without lightsabers and the force or The Matrix without the amazing special effects and wall running.
"The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word"
"What i want to concentrate on here is the way in which visual thinking has come to dominate out thinking, to the exclusion of everything else."
"Lesson #5 Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling"
Spatial Thinking:
I am going to be completely honest here i say that i didn't fully understand this enough to write and example in my our terms until i read this extract so instead of trying to put this is simpler terms i am going to add it in here because if it can make me understand it it can make anyone understand spatial thinking.
"Lesson #6 Stories take place on stages, not maps"
Temporal Discontinuity:
This i have understood thankfully. Basically this in the order and length of time in real life and within the film, television or theatrical industry. A key example to this is that in films a gap of many years is simply shorten for our viewing needs by the line "a few years later" but we don't fully know what has happened in those years and we don't care all we want to know is how do they look now or what is going to happen not what happened in the bit we didn't see. Films, theatre etc can use this to their advantage as travelling miles across an ocean doesn't take days it takes minutes showing us the main point of the story if it is needed i.e. what the people are doing on the boat, if nothing interesting or nothing that continues the story is going to happen on the boat then the boat is simply shown leaving one place and arriving at the next, our brain fills in the blanks.
However with computer games this is not done so much, in fact the main concern for game creators is actually the physical time it takes a player to finish a game from start to finish, perhaps some games include captions like "some time later" for example when the player is knocked unconscious and the surrounding area has changed dramatically or something similar, otherwise the caption is not used and you would normally see the player standing up as the screen fades in from a black screen.
-Dan
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