ABSTRACT
Images are far more effective at expressing a story than dialogue or text because as much as 80% of human interaction is transmitted through the sense of sight. Dialogue should only be used in support of the visual story-hence, the lm industry’s motto: “show, don’t tell.” What sets video games apart from other storytelling mediums is the active participation of the player-audience. Hence, Jeremy Bernstein’s guiding principle of “do, don’t show,” which prioritizes player activity over visuals and dialogue. Video games certainly do a lot of “showing,” as we explored in dynamic composition. However, the maxim nicely summarizes a fundamental design principle for the game development industry. Because the playeraudience has the added task of interacting with the story-the task of actively doing things-the concepts of anticipation and contemplation that we explored in the previous section must be treated with even more sensitivity than for lm.
