String of Pearls
One of the two methods of story telling in games. It involves a pre-scripted, linear story interupted by free play (challenges, puzzles etc). Notable examples are The Last of Us. Even games that have non-linear stories generally are just series of strings of pearls.
The opposite of The Story Machine, which generates a unique story every game. Schell (2015) (Chapter 17)
References
Jesse Schell. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. CRC Press, Boca Raton, second edition edition, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4665-9864-5. ↩