People sometimes ask me; "How do you write story for games? Where do you start? What do you really do?"

It’s all about immersion

Imagine you were to hold an apple out in front of you and let it go. Instead of falling, it floats in mid-air. Would you not think that you had gone mad?

If the laws of physics we know to be true failed, even for a moment, you might begin to question the entire world. Your belief in this reality would be shaken, your immersion would be broken.

What are stories for?

Story is there to explain the physics of virtual worlds. It fits within the limits of technical design, logically explaining why everything works the way it does. If one apple floats all the apples should float, and they should do so for logical, plausible and consistent reasons.

In order to immerse someone in a virtual or augmented experience you have to convince them that magic exists. When you can get that idea past a cynical audience, well, that's when you've got them hooked.

Tricking the mind

The gap between 'real' and 'not real' widens as we grow and learn; believing in magic was easy when we were children, but the more we know about the world the harder it becomes. We stop accepting the simple lies that used to hold us spellbound, even when we want to be immersed in something we know to be unreal. Our minds start to look for cracks.

The acceptance of untrue ideas is essential to any immersive experience, be it a simple ghost story or a multi-million-dollar motion picture, and plot holes in the fabric of the world separate the ideas we can easily accept as 'real' from those that grate like a pebble in a shoe. Your virtual dreamer becomes aware of the dream the moment you present something too strange to believe.

This is why the story behind an immersive experience should hold up just as well as the code behind its physics.