Candy Crush Saga

gamedeveloper.com:

Whenever narrative-focused games are mentioned, mobile games like Candy Crush don't often come up. As a match-3 puzzle title, expectations are generally not high about its capacity to tell a story. And yet, the series has undergone a transformation since its original release. Today at GDC 2022 Abigail Rindo, director of narrative design at Candy Crush Saga developer King, gave a talk detailing the company's strategy for transforming the series into a meaningful narrative experience. 

The talk began with a quote from writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson that summarized their approach, that "the human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories," Added Rindo, "Humans tell stories to instruct and guide their shared experience." It is the act of storytelling that attributes value and meaning. 

It's through three key pillars that players derive that meaning and value from their in-game surroundings, Rindo explained. Emotion, action and context all drive one another to create an ecosystem of player motivation and comprehension. As she says, "player centricity across all disciplines creates best narrative." Context produces and informs motivation through emotions and actions. Conceit is the central rule of your game world, essentially a loose agreement between the player and designer, and should answer key questions with regards to player motivation, leveraging world knowledge while laying foundations of relatability. "Set foundational context and conceits and metaphors that reference existing mental models." Metaphors allow designers to connect the player's world knowledge to abstract game concepts and verbs, reducing the energy a player spends trying to interpret them.

Much of Rindo's talk