Posts Tagged: Design

Academic / Game Design — 20 Comments
12
Jul 10

The game narrative triangle

There doesn’t seem to be a lot going on in the game scene right now (at least for people not interested in motion controls, ever-more-unsettling modern war shooters and misjudged forum policies), so I’m taking advantage of the quiet time to go back some of the basic structures in games. Today I’m taking a first-principles look at the kinds of stories videogames tell.

It’s generally agreed that there are two types of game stories: what the script says and what the player does. Or as Valve writer Erik Wolpaw put it in a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in 2008:

Games tell two stories: the story story – the narrative story that’s the sum total of a game’s cutscenes and dialogue; and the gameplay story – the story described by the actions the player takes in the game world.

Game designer Marc LeBlanc proposed the names “embedded narrative”, for the story set into the game by the designers, and “emergent narrative”, for the story that emerges from the process of playing.

There’s a third type of story in videogames, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Continue reading →

Game Design / Industry — 1 Comment
18
Dec 09

What my television set can learn from videogames

People often pick up my Wii Remote trying to change the channel. It’s not a bad idea.

Observe the following evidence.

My Wii Remote:

IMG_0161

Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 3 Comments
2
Oct 09

Play Ball, Sports Fans!

Embarking on a voyage of discovery needn’t involve travelling to foreign countries, although it may sometimes feel like it.

I’m not much of a sportsman.  As far as revelations go, that ranks up there somewhere between MTV’s sudden realisation that Kanye West is a general jackass and that Cliffy B has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with too many burly men packed into too small a space too far away from their wives.  Who, apparently, are ‘unfortunately’ no longer in the picture, so to speak.

But, I digress.

I’m not much of a sportsman; on some level, I never really got sports.  Basketball I understood, but then again, I was tall.   And, when you’re tall and speak with an American accent in Australia, it’s a given that you can shoot a hoop, trash talk, and dunk.  Still, performance on the court aside, on some level I could at least get the attraction to sports.  If not physically then intellectually – the rules offered interesting dynamics, even if I frequently couldn’t play worth squat. While I didn’t have close to the requiste knowledge to understand A-list team dynamics, the attraction constantly floated just beyond my realm of comprehension, much like most of the deconstructionism we covered in English lit.  There was something there, even if I couldn’t touch it, explain it, or fully understand it. Continue reading →