Posts Tagged: Jargon

Academic / Game Design — 17 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 →

Experience / Game Design — No Comments
27
Nov 09

Bad developer! No cookie! #1

Designing a game can’t be easy, but there are some things that are simply unforgivable.

redstormrisingBack when Tom Clancy worked with MicroProse on Red Storm Rising in the late ’80s he made a passing comment that once they were finished, they’d never need to create another submarine game again.  Because, after all, it was all just bits and rules – get it right once, and it’ll be perfect forever.  The developers laughed at his naïveté (behind closed doors, I assume – you don’t laugh at a guy with NSA-level connections to his face), but in hindsight, he was probably right: Red Storm Rising, despite all its graphical limitations, is still one of the best submarine games ever created.

In my ongoing (if somewhat sporadic) attempt to explore a new genre, I’ve come to the conclusion that MLB 09: The Show is arguably the closest thing to a “perfect” baseball game out there.  Pitchers change their stance based on the ball they’re throwing, there’s about twelve different ways you can steal bases (right down to being able to slide left or right on your personal approach), and statistics really do mean something throughout the game.  Unfortunately, none of that was worth much to me when I couldn’t even reliably hit a ball, much less understand what the hell the game was telling me when it threw up pages of statistics on team, player, and season performance with no reference or assistance. Continue reading →