Tag Archives: Narrative

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

Written by Aram Zucker-Scharff on May 9, 2012 at 1:03 pm

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

The Grind: An MMORPG Tragedy

Written by Patrick Lindsey on April 16, 2012 at 1:28 pm

This is a story about a girl.

No, not in the way you’re thinking. Not really, anyway. I’m not talking about the girl next door or the redhead behind the counter at the coffee shop. The girl this story is about is a videogame character. Not just any character – my character. My alt, in an MMO.

She was a thing of beauty, this alt of mine. Lithe and sinewy, bright eyes and a hard line of a mouth. She wasn’t born, she was built – built feverishly, though not casually. She was fresh and exciting, bursting with possibilities and power, the feeling you only get from beginning a brand new roll. She was a break from the worn monogamy of my main character, a strapping lad of a totally different class and alignment on a whole other server. Sometimes I wondered if our nights out were viewed as a slight, some kind of digital infidelity.

The Paragon Homunculus in ME

Written by Ken Hannahs on April 12, 2012 at 5:43 pm

Over the course of seven days I fell in and out of love, only to find it again in the arms of another. I stopped a genocide, only to cause two others; I talked people off ledges, helped mend broken minds and hearts while being a harbinger of death and destruction wherever I went. I discovered ancient secrets lost for countless millennia, and stumbled upon smaller secrets of unrequited love. In one week I became the catalyst that led to destruction, yet victory; death as well as life. I went from an Executive Officer to Spectre to War Hero. I died, was brought back to life, then joined a terrorist organization. I encountered a force of abominations building a super weapon and destroyed them. Over the course of a week, many people died under my command, and the worst part is I could have done more to save them.

Over the period of a week, I played the complete Mass Effect trilogy.

The impetus to this story is a scenario that can only be deemed ridiculous. I managed to significantly hobble myself the day prior to this playfest beginning thanks to the perilous feat that is running to first base in kickball. …

How You Got Videogames Wrong: …And film…and music…and literature…etc.

Written by Eric Lockaby on April 4, 2012 at 12:55 pm

Pissing you off in installments, the monthly series “How You Got Videogames Wrong” delves beyond appearances into the slimy interior of The God’s Truth (about videogames). This month we’ll be looking at “Show, don’t tell”—and how it might not mean what you thought it did.

“Show, don’t tell,” is a fundamental lesson in crafting good fiction; in games we go one step further.

—“Storytelling In Dark Souls And Skyrim,” Erik Kain, Forbes, Mar. 201

Ain’t that something: Thirty-five thousand years of storytelling from the Chauvet-pont-d’Arc to Midnight’s Children and videogames “go a step further.” How so? Dive posthaste into the Ye Ol’ Interwebs and you’ll find the following answers: “Play, don’t tell,” sez the trope wiki TVtropes.org; “Do, don’t show or tell” sez Elements of Play’s William Strife, on the basis that “[Books and movies] tell and show their stories respectively; however, games are about doing”; and let’s not forget the aforementioned Forbes article, which goes on to say that “story ought to be embedded within the gameplay itself, with only the briefest of interludes.” Has the world moved on from “Show, don’t tell”?

Sort of—just not for the reasons that you think. In 1961’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, American literary critic …

The Dear Esther Interlard

Written by Ken Hannahs on March 30, 2012 at 6:37 pm

You are on a macadam jetty — ostensibly shipwrecked — looking out over a briny shoreline that snakes its way out into the distance before disappearing behind a limestone cliff face. Even further stands a radio tower on which a pair of nictitant red lights burn through the seaside fog in equal parts beacon and warning. You turn to your right and are confronted by the crepuscular candy cane husk of a long-forgotten lighthouse, by all accounts abandoned and forgotten. The seaside wind chills you to your waterlogged bones, and to escape the howling wind, you retreat into the abandoned lighthouse.That is, you thought it was abandoned. But out of the corner of your eye, you swear you saw a figure of a woman. Was it real? Your mind is awash with fright, yet you are also tired. So tired. What is and isn’t real is certainly up for debate, and so, reassuring yourself in your sleepy stupor, you clutch your arms around yourself, steel your resolve, and press onward, alone.

***

Dear Esther reminds me of the Irish literary tradition of taking long morose looks at something beautifully dreadful. What makes this game tick is its incessant willingness …

A History of Mutual Looting, and What Videogames Can Learn From Non-D&D Tabletop RPGs

Written by Kevin Veale on March 28, 2012 at 3:32 pm

Cameo 2, from "Overboard: The Board Game Webcomic" by Author M and Artist J.

The historical relationship between videogames and tabletop RPGs is not hard to spot, and they work together very naturally (1): computers present the opportunity to automate the underlying mechanics of game play. Although the majority of games based on tabletop systems have related to the Dungeons and Dragons franchise in some way, and the systems that underlie it in different eras, it’s not the sole contributor. Fallout was originally going to use GURPS, the Generic Universal RolePlaying System as its mechanical core, except that was stripped out and replaced with the SPECIAL system designed for the game. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was grounded in White Wolf’s “Storyteller” system for the tabletop games belonging to their World of Darkness stable.

However, in recent times the relationship between the two forms has been largely one-way: tabletop RPGs have taken inspiration from videogame mechanics more often than videogames have borrowed from the opportunities presented by tabletop gaming. This statement is in itself controversial: wander into any forum devoted to tabletop RPGs and voice the opinion that the 4th Edition of D&D has taken mechanical inspiration from videogames and there’ll be a flamewar or bannings within minutes, since people have taken this to be …

Death and Storytelling

Written by Kevin Veale on March 21, 2012 at 8:00 pm

One of the distinguishing – though not universal – features of playing games is that you die. The natural phrase people use – even small kids who’ve not learned it via experience – is to say “I died,” not “Mario died.”

This presents an opportunity for storytelling that a variety of games have explored over the last decade or so, as part of what makes the experience of games unique. Games make things personal: when something happens, it happens to you, not a character in a book or a film.

When characters die in books or films, it might be startling, or shocking, but it’s experienced differently when we’re dealing with games. Two of the iconic moments of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare involve experiencing death. The first is where the player is driven around in the back seat of a car, clearly a prisoner. We can look around, but not move: this is a Half-Life style opening where we get information about our context and environment, and then something will happen where we can take back the control that is our assumed-state in playing games! …Only nothing happens. We get put up against a wall. A guy in …

Darwinian Difficulty in Metal Gear Solid 3

Written by Johnny Kilhefner on March 14, 2012 at 12:26 pm

Photo credit: Benjamin Skelly

It’s your responsibility as a gamer to be as sadistic as possible. If you want to know what a character is made of, he must suffer intolerable cruelties. Don’t worry, he can take it; he’s designed to take it. But you — you twisted sadomasochist you — will have to endure as well, for you are not just the torturer but the tortured.

In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Naked Snake is told by his beloved mentor, “The Boss,” that he has yet to find the right emotion to carry into battle. He’s still a boy to the Cobra Unit — a vicious gang of misfits whose skills are legendary — and only until he learns to think like a solider can he complete his mission, for better or worse. Snake’s growth is achieved through the age-old story mechanic of placing him up a tall tree and throwing rocks at him. If the player is to truly emphasize with Snake’s plight, he needs to be in that tree alongside him. This, I hypothesize, is where the concept of Darwinian Difficulty as an agent of empathy and a motivator for thinking like a soldier comes into play. …

We’re smarter than you think

Written by Tom Auxier on March 8, 2012 at 11:45 am

Over the years exploration has been rewarded with collectibles. Mario taking a separate path got him to a magical switch. Items you scoured levels to collect rewarded you with items that provided minor gameplay benefits. Exploration made you stronger or let you continue playing the game.

Bioshock challenged this paradigm. You found collectibles that would make the game easier, but you also found audio diaries that allowed the player to delve deeper into the history and reality of the game world. Go to the arts district, for instance, and you’ll find stories of artists living in the city of Rapture; these diaries gave life to the world. And while they were definitely referenced, they were in small, noncritical ways: for instance, you read a report of Rapture’s security chief electrocuting a man as interrogation. Then, you find the man, dead in a pool of electrified water. It’s a lovely moment created by optional information, but it’s in no way critical to the plot: all the characters are long dead. These moments existed in previous games, notably System Shock and Deus Ex, but Bioshock made them vogue again. It picked up those games’ arrested influences and ran with them.

Why some game developers shouldn’t like games

Written by Tom Auxier on February 23, 2012 at 7:02 pm

Why can’t we gamers accept that someone who doesn’t love games with the fervent passion we do can make them?

I’m proud to say one of my favorite games of all time—Katamari Damacy—comes from the mind of someone who doesn’t like games very much at all, Keita Takahashi. He seems happier designing playgrounds than he did video games. And yet, this is the man who made a game I could play forever.

Or look at Rockstar, a company founded by two gentlemen, Sam and Dan Houser, who wanted to go into the music business, whose inspirations have been more the classic films of Americana, the Spaghetti Westerns and crime films that formed the basis of their groundbreaking work on Grand Theft Auto. In the beginning, though, they didn’t want to make games. They began to make games out of pure necessity, a desire to find more creative freedom.

So, I ask again: should these people not make games?

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