Distorting time and space
Recently I watched a quite famous movie, a bit old already, but I hadn't seen it yet: Memento. For those who haven't watched it yet, it's about a man with a condition: due to a blow to the head he can't create new memories, so after a while he forgets everything.
The movie begings at the end of the story. Then it goes back until the last time when he forgot, and tells us what happened. Then it goes back again until the time before when he forgot everything and tells what happened until what we already know. It's complicated to explain, but let's say that the movie tells us the story from the end to the beginning. The interesting part is that, as the protagonist can't remember anything, he doesn't know what happened either. Better watch the movie to understand.
The point of all of this is, that that movie was a (relative) success because it broke the common structure used to tell stories, same as other movies like Pulp Fiction. And I think it's very interesting doing that. I mean, we all have the same structures and systems and organizations to tell our stories. Sometimes someone makes a little change, right, but we don't really "break" it.
Like Nietzsche said "not even the bravest of us is brave enough to face what he already knows". There are a lot of things we take for granted and we don't dear to question.
It can be very interesting, for example, playing the different chapters in a game in an anachronistic order. Figuring things out through the chapters, like traveling in time. Or same with space. We can tell a story, with different characters in different places.
Or maybe with "quantum physics". Quantum physics is, to sum up, "what could happen". What about letting players play (live) possible futures or outcomes to later take a decision. Things like that.
The point is that, we do not always need to repeat the same order and structure to tell a story. We can have several protagonists, we can have even different versions of the same characters, we can radically change the place, or time, or context, or style of our game.
And that's also interesting. Style. We always take for granted that a game must have a specific common style. And true, when a game hasn't a defined specific style, most of times it turns out to be ugly and uncomfortable. If it's made without any sense. But with design and strategy, accompanied by narrative and story, it can be very shocking (in the good sense) to change the style of our game.
Also as a tool to confuse the player and make a psychotic game. The conclusion of this article is to challenge you, a game developer and designer I guess, to defy the stablished rules even beyond the unstablished rules. I mean, as I said, it's relatively easy to "break the rules", but once we do we can see that we've left yet many other rules and structures. To say so, we think we're breaking the house and we're just cracking the wall.
So here's an advice: once you defy the rules. Take what you've got as a result, and defy that too. Do not try to think always logically and with sense. Be crazy, be senseless, lose your head, do something radical. I'm not saying that a game will be successful for that, just that it's an interesting way to experiment.