Games Stories
This week, I read two different articles and watched a video on why having some sort of storyline or narrative to your game can be quite important.
In the first article, they talk about whether games can be considered 'art' or not. The article starts off by talking about how a game being 'fun' isn't the only prime intention of the game, that games can also be critically assessed on how they are designed and how they look.
I agree that as much as a game should be fun and enjoyable, a game should also be nice to look at, you don't want things to look out of place, or for there to be too much going on in the background or forefront of the game while you're playing it.
In the second article, they talk about what every game developer needs to know about story. They mention how to approach bringing a story into a game, games are not movies, so you don't exactly need to have a beginning, middle and end, just a sort of structure to tell a small story within the game. Story isn't just dialogue, story can come in the form of conflict, in your game you can have an enemy to fight off and that can be the story, it doesn't have to be complex and have several different approaches, it can be something simple and you can pass it off as a story.
In the video, it talks about telling a story with different systems. It talks about how in interactive games, like the walking dead, they remember each choice you make and how the characters react to the way you treat them, however most of the time, no matter what choices you make through the game, usually the ending is still set in stone, or at least that version of the ending will be incorporated in the game at some point. They want you to think that your choices matter in determining what happens, when in reality they don't really change the plot of the game.
Games that usually have the most player-interactive things are games that don't promote themselves as interactive. Games that don't really have a plot, but still let you make decisions in the game seem to be more real and let you determine what happens.
Bibliography:
Level 8: Games and Art by Unknown- Source
What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story by John Sutherland- Source
Telling Stories with Systems by Game Makers Toolkit- Source
Hey Rachel,
ReplyDeleteThat was an interesting read. I love how you incoperated choice based games into your blog, spacifically "Tell Tales; The Walking Dead" Such a great story driven game series. What I love about that is that it is episodic, so like a tv show you have to wait for each episode and season, the only difference is that it is like an interactive episode that you get to make the choices, but as you have stated, the game gives you an illusion that the choices are yours, because they ending is all the same. I dont know if you ever played "Until Dawn"? A similar experience where you get choices. the main plot is the same but you can have so many different endings. Games like that are awesome because you can keep going back to them and they will be different every time.