Susanne Wejp-Olsen WEEK 8

Though our group is still working on the bigger picture, I started to take a look at various interface designs. I suddenly realized that interface design is a much bigger world than I had anticipated with its own vocabulary and history of evolution. However, I think it’s going to be very exciting to figure out the specifics of our interface as soon as we get to the point where all the major play elements are in place.

Kelsey Sharpe-- Week 8-- Antagonist

One of the things our group still needs to get a handle on is the terrorist/anarchist cell that our main character is struggling against. While tamping down the internal structure of the group is important for determining things like mid-bosses and game narrative, I think that the more important aspect is the group's leader--our main villain.

Villain, however, is a word that I am hesitant to use. I think that antagonist would work better, as we've largely agreed that we would like our antagonist to be more compelling and troubled than outright evil. In a game where our central focus is varied, interesting characters, a cliche , mustache-twirling villain seems like something of a cop-out. At this point we need to carefully frame the background and inspirations of our antagonist, and I feel that hopefully from there we will be able to craft a character who will be troubling both for the game player and for our protagonist--someone who is both sympathetic and ignoble. I think that by setting up the antagonist in a comparison with C Monitor, we will be able to show how the two are really just different permutations of the same character type. We can therefore show how our antagonist could've gone about things the right way, and how our protagonist could just as easily fall into the wrong way.

John - Week 8

This week, we made a lot of progress working out the kinks in our story. However, that created some complications with our world design, which is forcing us to rework things to some degree. I wonder how common this phenomenon is when using the approach we took in this class. When you create all these rich characters and a rich world, it seems inevitable to me that there will be problems trying to reconcile them all with each other. This problem is only exacerbated when you’re dealing with eight designers, each with their own ideas about character, world and story. How have other groups approached this problem?

Ellen- Week 7- February 26th

Our group seems to be caught up on the story/ characters... we've been waivering back and forth between different scenarios to try and 'fix' our problems. I'm not sure if our problems are just part of the natural creative process, the result of a large group with members who are at odds with one another, due to a story that just isn't really strong enough to work or due to our group possibly focusing too much on story and world and not enough on game play.

Regardless of the amount of work we've put into the story and characters, I step back and look at the bigger picture and wonder if the game is going to be any fun to play. I hope so. Is anyone in the other groups experiencing a similar struggle?

Ellen

kristy norindr week 7

Coming up with a game concept is HARD!

One of the challenges in the development of our game, Asylum, is how to make a game simultaneously fun and novel. It was helpful to think less about the overarching story today and more about how/why a player might feel compelled to continue playing. In order to make a game fun, we must think about the game mechanic and how to balance the intrigue of our game with compelling challenges.

Games that I enjoy playing are fairly simple. There may be one game mechanic that seamlessly integrates with the objectives and visible space. Ideally, the atmosphere should give the player information about the game through the use of space and objects reflecting the games own objectives and challenges.

Working through the functionality of our game mechanic (injecting patients with different drugs in order to alter their intrinsic behavior) is providing us with some problems/research questions/challenges. What is essential in our game, and what is extraneous? How can we eliminate unnecessary elements and retain the essence of our game? Have we built a shaky foundation and not reconsidered the base before we pile on more elements?

Justin Week 7 (Again): The Next Step

I didn't want to post one right after the other (double post), but my forgetfulness seems to have necessitated it. I suppose it'll work out, because I'm just building off of my last post.

MAG is a good example of what true interactive story is capable of, but it isn't the whole idea. While it does have a light overarching goal, that goal never changes, and advancement ceases to be truly significant after a while with no future or end in sight. So what needs to be done?

Firstly, you'd need more than just hierarchical advancement. That's a strong start (which is somewhat original for multiplayer first-person shooters), but actual world progression, beyond the incredibly large scale maps already present in the game, would add to the depth. For example, NOBY NOBY BOY--without explaining what that game is all about--takes the combined stretch-length of all the players around the world and uses that as the determining factor for which new worlds are accessed. The players originally started out on the Earth, but with their combined stretching, they were able to reach the moon in actual miles. It's a great distance in real miles, so the combined effort was a task that artificially unified a player-base, as no one could play those worlds until everyone pooled their efforts. Currently the standing is at Jupiter, and eventually the rest of the Solar System will be reached.

The problem with NOBY NOBY BOY is that direct interaction between players is nonexistent, and aside from seeking new worlds, there's nothing to drive a player onward. Should one combine the element of unlockable or attainable lands, bases, or worlds to the already highly social interactive MAG, it would allow for some much needed progression to give the free-forming story more flow and course.

Of course it's entirely possible that this world will run out of expansion, and that's why after-market content is so important. Games like Team Fortress 2 keep the experience fresh by consistently updating the game with new content like maps and player weapons, which all expand upon the in-game story elements and the player story elements as well. Again, combine this with the inter-workings of MAG, and the story remains fresh and alive with growing changes that reflect real-world counterparts, and can even start up new story threads of their own, depending on the content, which allows definite ends and definite beginnings.

The problem with after-market content is that it is rather costly, and the question of whether to charge for it and deprive some of the player-base or to make it free and lose money is a difficult one and an often turned one. In a situation like MAG, where the world is already strongly established and the player-base has firmly planted their story paths, minimalism may play the best role in all of this. A gameplay tweak here, a weapon added here, a new set of armor there, and maybe a new map every now and then, can keep the cost down for everyone and still allow the game to have enough breath and breadth in it to keep the interactive story fresh and alive, by providing suprising new abilities and obstacles. Surprise is and has always been an important part of interactive entertainment.

So, overall, we'd have a situation where one group (PMC, in the case of MAG) can fight through everything and make their way to the top of everyone: That's one story. Another, is then the overthrow of that group by those who wish to maintain balance. Another still, is the rise of the underdog group to power who changes things drastically for everyone. And of course, yet another story would have to be the return of the original to power, and it continues on with a strong sense of an over-arching goal, and the change of the feel of the community with their own perspectives and the occasional introduction of new elements that change the fight for everyone.

The dread here is that with this living, breathing game, it comes dangerously close to the medium of Theater, which now is the ultimate living, breathing medium. Does this mean that it excludes itself from the runnings of media if it isn't set in stone? Does this mean it could replace theater as the ultimate form of creativity in media?

Either way, simply having the questions to ask is a wonderfully progressive step.

Justin Week 7: Interactive Interactivity

My biggest fear here is coming off incredibly pretentious. Despite that, I believe I fully realize pretentious asinine behavior to the greatest extent.

That said, the biggest caveat of interactive media is pigeon-holing it to other forms of media. Granted, with each new form of presentation since the book, we've taken media and compiled it anew with a fresh new element. From there is where you add the visual to the novel to create Film. From there, you add interactivity, and you get the Video Game, which hardly seems creative when compared to the brand new terminologies derived for the prior examples. Barring Theater (or Theatre) from these examples is negligent because it's been around forever and can do all of those things and more without limit because it's always alive. Of course, I am looking at media here, which is something in itself immortalized, so it must be stricken from the record.

This is the problem, however, the more freedom we get and the closer we get to imitating life, the more closed-in the product becomes. The beauty of Theater isn't that it is life, but that it breaks free of it within its own constraints: naturally, a struggle. The wanton necessitation to imitate old, derelict forms of media to add some qualifications to Video Games is so incredibly absurd when they are so much more advanced. Unless it's used for novelty, there's no reason to replicate aged methods. Instead, it's unfortunately made the standard.

I am not against having a form of story in the traditional sense of the term within a Video Game. By all means, one should not be stifled when creating an artistic vision. However, to inflate one's head and add various Tarantino tricks of the trade to a game and egregiously ape subtlety from others without fully understanding what makes subtlety subtlety, and not nothing, and call it original and a story that can only be told through Video Games is a blast against one's self and the well-being of others.

Branching story paths does not a video game make. Adventure novels have done this for years. They still persist to this day. Again, there is Theater that exists as improvisation, and films that deviate from their original paths and even incorporate multiple endings: Clue, for example. Even comic books poll the readership to see if sidekicks live or die. I reiterate: Multiplicity does not an absolute interactive Video Game make.

Then what story can only be told through Video Game? The best example I can give of this now is MAG, which itself is not the perfect example, but shall shed some light. MAG is a multiplayer-only first-person shooter exclusive to the PlayStation 3, that has almost no story. It has a loose body of framework to justify its existence, then it lets players fight on a team of 128 other live players against another set of another 128 live players simultaneously: in the same instance.

How does this have anything to do with story? Let me break it down: There are 3 PMCs fighting one another in the near future. 2 PMCs will face off at a time trying to hold their oil supply lines, or trying to destroy the others'. Each player can only have one character and must choose one PMC, and has to level up through that PMC or start afresh, with no abilities. The over-arching goal is that if one PMC destroys enough of anothers' supplies or retains enough of their own, they'll win oil contracts, which grant incredible benefits during battle.

Again, what does this have to do with story? This somewhat bare-bones approach is exactly what interactive media is all about. The story is 90% composed by the audience (or players, in this case). The other 10% is the story and assets built by the developers as ground work and the gameplay motivators that generate a need for large-scale leadership and personal and group advancement. The player derives that they are a part of a dark shadow war and choose to align themselves with the faction that best suits their personality, whether it be with a group seeking the best in technological advancements, the group fighting for their civil liberty on a global scale, or the group seeking a way to end the global conflict. They become committed, with only one as an option. The players may then join a clan which will be their own personal squad with which they can grow with and form bonds on an entirely real level, dictated through the game, and as they grow with their squad, their personal abilities increase and they may shape themselves to suit their needs and the needs of their squad and their PMC as a whole. The story is different and unique to each player and even allows for advancement up to the highest level where they may command an entire company of 128 soldiers on a large real-time scale. However, the overall story is created by the cooperation of hundred of thousands of players and minute scales and grand scales, at many different levels with several different interpersonal story threads invented by the player-base as a whole. Victory and defeat is shared in-game with comrades and this is then extended even outside of the game, in social forums and the like, taking the interactive media all the way to the point where it goes beyond mere entertainment.

So you see, it is the containment, rules, and old standards that confine interactive media in this day and age, along with the thought process that games like MAG having no bearing or story hierarchy, when, in fact, the story is rich and deep, and subtle in ways that make full use of the weighted word. The next step would be to fully utilize the concept of interactivity in the medium that has it in the title: Interactive Media.

Michelle Neumann - Week 7ish

So i think yesterday our group had a mini breakthough, which is super exciting. As Kelsey addressed earlier, we were having a problem with finding the "so what" factor. I for one really like our game, but I too was having an issue with--why am i playing this/whats the point. It only took one idea really, but that one idea totally brought everything together, so i'm really looking forward to seeing how it all comes together now.

As for other video game issues, I've been trying to play at least a new game every week. I mean if i were taking a film class i'd be watching movies, so even though it is completely out of my comfort zone, i've been trying out different games. So far I've played Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bioshock, Bayonetta, Silent Hil, Uncharted 2, Dead Space, and last week Ghostbusters. Btw, the fact that almost all the original actors did the voice overs is so cool.

I think this has really helped me in understanding how to utilize game mechanics as well as storyline ideas. For me, i am definitly drawn more to a 3rd person game. 1st person shooters just aren't my thing--probably because i like the cinematic feel found in watching from afar.

:)

John - Week 6 and 7 - Double week mega-post

Week 6

One thing our group has been struggling with is reconciling our advancements in story with gameplay. I happened upon an article in Gamasutra that actually was very relevant to this struggle. It goes on to talk about how several game designers have dealt with this problem:

Hideo Kojima, who has concentrated strongly on narrative with his Metal Gear Solid games, has also expressed a desire to integrate those elements into gameplay more effectively than what he and others have been able to accomplish:

"In MGS4, yes, I put everything in the cut sequences, which I kind of regret to some extent, because maybe there is a new approach which I should think about. I'm always thinking about it -- making it interactive but at the same time telling the story part and the drama even more emotionally. I would like to take that approach, which I am still working on. "

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4253/the_uneasy_merging_of_narrative_.php

The author of the article would argue that gameplay and narrative are mortal enemies. He sees them as two separate components to be integrated:

So the apparent desire of the industry and many of its luminaries is not to strictly combine gameplay and visual narrative -- we have been doing that ever since we could make something look like an embattled sword instead of a line of white pixels. The desire is in fact to elegantly combine the richest expressions of gameplay with the richest expressions of narrative without a compromise of either.

He does recognize, however, that gameplay can’t be entirely divorced from narrative:

It's clear that games have spent a lot of time in this rudimentary combination of gameplay and visual narrative. When I play Gradius, there is a narrative going on even when there is no substantial story to speak of. I'm controlling a ship, I'm in space, I'm shooting the bad guys. I'm going to shoot all the bad guys I see until I get to the baddest one, and then I'm going to shoot that one too. It's not the most interesting narrative, but there it is.

I’m not so sure that I agree with his assessment that such expression is simplistic. Nor would I agree that taking the richest story and the richest gameplay and throwing it in a blender would create a good game. Rather, I would argue that what games really seek to represent are experiences, not stories. For example, Mario Kart is so wildly successful because it creates experiences among friends. What makes Mario Kart so compelling is not whatever its excuse for a story is, it’s the story that is created between the players - “Remember that time I knocked you into the lava right before you got to the finish line?”

In a Comm Studies class I took on gaming last Spring, one of the key concepts was that people play games because they are intrinsically enjoyable. That is, they play games because they are fun. They don’t play boring games just to follow a story, mindlessly mashing buttons to see what’s next. If players do play a game for the story, the process of discovery of that story must be fun. In context of that article I linked to, what that means is that ideally, gameplay should in some way be a reflection of the story.

For example, in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, the story is one of self-discovery: the young boy comes to learn his own powers and gains the trust of the community, ultimately to save the world from corruption. As you played the game, you travel from land to land, all while accumulating different items and magical powers. This accumulation makes sense in context of the story, because the story is all about the young boy gaining powers and growing up. In my opinion, that’s what makes this game so powerful: this process of growing up isn’t simply talked about in a cutscene, it’s reflected in the gameplay. You gain the powers and you grow up alongside Link, forging an emotional bond with the character. It’s not the story that does it. The story itself is actually a pretty standard coming-of-age story. It’s all about how the story is told.

Week 7

The feedback that we received from our presentation this week made a lot of sense to me. I really liked the suggestion of putting ourselves in Loki’s (the villain’s) shoes, almost as if we were playing the game as him. We realized that the character was not deep enough, but we just could not get any traction towards making him more believable. I expect that this technique will help coalesce our ideas about him into actions, instead of scattered, vague ideas.

The other thing that spoke to me was giving our game a “center”. When Larry said that, the first thing that came to mind was Halo’s “30 seconds of gameplay”. Halo is famous for stretching out what is essentially the same 30 seconds of gameplay for the entire game. What is amazing about the development team’s accomplishment is that those 30 seconds never get old - they are as fun as they were the very first time you experienced them.

That example made it strikingly clear that we did not have that in our game yet. I think that once we make the conflict between Loki and the children more compelling, we will have a clearer idea of how we can translate that conflict into the central gameplay experience of our game.

Bane, (Post-) Week 7

I've been thinking about flow charts and story paradigms pretty extensively this week -- related, of course, to keeping our game as "experimental" as possible. By "experimental" I suppose I mean nontraditional structure -- but increasingly I'm coming to realize that we need to alter the underlying storytelling paradigm, not just the order in which the various story beats are revealed. The monomyth simply won't be sufficient for a multifaceted story such as this; there needs to be a ground-up difference between our narrative and the myth arc to which the developed world is accustomed.

I'm still having trouble articulating what this non-monomythic story might look like (after all, how do you discover a story that has rarely, if ever, been told? Such a story would be antithetical to ancient/primal existence, wherein time could not have been conceived of but as a unidirectional construct), but at the moment I've been thinking primarily about Celtic knots and puzzle rings. What would likely be most successful is if we design a flow chart that can be inverted/reshaped into four different configurations. Another thought that occurs to me is that of a cat's cradle, each design both standing as an individual, but also setting up its successor. What our group requires, then, is four different configurations per stage -- each single configuration must naturally lead to three counterpart storylines.

A point is one-dimensional. A line is an accumulation of points in the second dimension. Applied to the third dimension, a line can become a cube, a form to which we are accustomed (since humans interact with our world in three dimensions). The monomyth, then, is a slave to the third dimension. In order to tell a story that exists in a more complex world than our own, what we require is to tesseract the monomyth.

This is an extraordinarily difficult concept to articulate verbally: our best bet is a method of visual storytelling/interactivity with the audience.

Kelsey Sharpe--Week 7--Presentation Aftermath

All of the groups have now presented their projects and received feedback, so I think it's going to be interesting to see how things progress from here. I was unable to attend Wednesday's lab (one of the reasons why my group went a week early), so I don't know what sort of suggestions the other groups received, but our main issue seemed to be with investing our story with a sense of importance or purpose for the player.

As an English major, I spend much of my time writing essays that analyze literature and then put forth an argument about it. This argument, the thesis, is the crux of the paper--it can make you or break you. One of the most important parts of your thesis is what we like to call a "so what." A "so what" takes your argument and then expands it to show the reader why they should care about it, or why it's important. Maybe Hamlet hates Claudius not only because Claudius killed old King Hamlet, but also because Hamlet has an incestuous desire for his mother Gertrude. So what? Who cares? Well, maybe that means that Hamlet is getting revenge on Claudius not because he killed King Hamlet, but rather because he took away Hamlet's chance to complete the Oedipal cycle by killing his father himself. Whether or not we agree if it's a viable argument, I think we can all agree that the "so what" makes it a lot more interesting and juicy.

What I'm trying to get at, in a round-about way, is that our game currently lacks a "so what." I think we've got a pretty compelling argument--perfection leads to stagnation--but we presently lack a reason why that is the case, or why that is something the player should care about. I think that once we find our "so what," it's not only going to add a lot in terms of story depth, but also in terms of how our player will be intrigued and/or motivated to keep playing and reach the end.

Joshua Nuernberger, Week 7

One point of critique that I got a lot from last Wednesday was the notion of challenge. This goes back to the idea of motivating the player--what's the reason for them to do anything at all? If there's no problem to solve, no enemy to overcome, then why act? What are you trying to achieve? If you place a player in a new situation, I believe that he or she should have a goal, something to aspire to, in order to force that player to make decisions.

This doesn't mean you have to necessarily force them down one linear path for one specific predefined answer that is being shoved down their throat. Rather, their goal can be something as simple as "survive." Then as they proceed through a level, the players can discover on their own what to do in order to survive. This could be get to higher ground, lock off a section of the facility from an impending zombie attack, or head for the supply room two floors down.

In my opinion, goals give players something to which they aspire to, and through that they can make intelligent choices on how to achieve those goals. Goals don't have to be consumed with linearity and predefined choices--rather, they can be the means to making resourceful non-linear choices.

Susanne Wejp-Olsen - Week 7

THE BIG IDEA

Digesting some of the feedback from Wednesday’s presentation, I took a look at gametrailers.com and had a great time watching trailers for some of the new games coming out. As much as a lot of the graphics were very impressive – especially the preview for Final Fantasy VIII – it struck me that THE BIG IDEA was not that clear or intuitively compelling for a lot of the games. Perhaps it’s the nature of game play – lots of options, fast visuals – that it is easy in the creative phase to feel tempted to move forward and come up with all the exciting details. However, I do think if we somehow are able to step back for a little bit and see if there’s a way we can distil our vision into a really simple concept (which from looking at what the pros are doing is of course a lot harder than it sounds) would really give our story the foundation it needs for all the other fun stuff. Looking at all the previews and trailers also made me really look forward to getting further into the game play of our stories – I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to come up with all the different moves/weapons etc. that our little friends will be able to use.

Lauren Percivalle - Wk 7

Working in a group has its problems, but it definitely has its perks as well. By collaborating on a single project, I've been able to notice and pinpoint a lot of very fixable errors that I probably wouldn't have even recognized on my own. I think pooling together vast amounts of insight with a large group can be confusing, but if approached in the right way, can serve as quite the boon. As long as you are with the right people, one o.k idea can grow into something pretty cool, and having a certain number of people focusing on that can make that growth happen quicker and with higher quality.

I know most of this is probably pretty obvious once you think about it, but whatever I find it nice. :O

february 21st- week 7- Ellen

I've been digesting our feedback from Wednesday and am looking forward to discussing this as a group.

Approaching what our Trickster's plan for the children is by putting ourselves in his place will, I think, give us some direction that we were lacking.

Ellen

February 13th- week 6- Ellen

The interesting part of collaborating with a team of 8 is trying to get on the same page- not so much just in trying to narrow things down by choosing specific directions- but in trying to understand what each others visual concepts are about things we agree on verbally. In other words our group hit a bit of a glitch because we had all been agreeing on things verbally only to realize we not only had some different overall visuals in mind, but, I think also a different conceptual idea of how the game is mapped out.

Bane, Week 6. Ergh Time.

So, here we go, first blog post of the noo year: AnooYear, AnooYoo, as it were. The complexity of our game (still sin nombre, but that'll probably be remedied by 3:59:50pm on Wednesday) is such that we could either program some very complex AI, or we can plot it out by hand, and I'm assuming we'll take the latter path. Time-consuming, yes, but incredibly rewarding -- something along the lines of sitting here even now and looking over what we've come up with thus far. Maslow, Myer-Briggs, Keirsey, Spranger (to whom my computer is refusing to allot a single measly umlaut), the Golden Ratio, and pitcher plants. Or something along those lines. All with ultimate playability and REplayability -- which is, of course, rockingness.

Thus far I'm still grappling with the idea of experimental vs. mainstream: where do those lines fall? I'm fairly dead-set against the idea of an Answer (sacrosanctity=bullshit to our generation, that of the straight-from-the-womb gamer), but I do understand, from much personal experience, that fulfillment is intrinsically tied to the idea of a definite leaving-off point, even if it's not where Thus The Tale Endeth. This wariness is somewhat tempered by the concept of an adaptable backstory that changes based on how you play: whether a computer figures it all out, or whether I'll be sitting at my desk (read: cat butt sprawled in my lap -- there are three of them, after all) drawing lines between boxes in a Gordonian knot of chronospatial hoojamawhatsit, this is a concept designed to make the player feel like we wrote this game specifically for their aesthetic. After all, they won't necessarily know at first blush *exactly* how many aesthetics this game contains, which will be quite a few when all the malleable factors are taken into account.

All right, enough ranting for now. Time to dive back into the pile of literature that's my typical go-to stack for creative inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Garth Nix, Orson Scott Card, Jorge Luis Borges...

Joshua Nuernberger--Week 6--Contextual Storytelling

I'm going to tell you a secret: our game is set on a spaceship. Now, what does that mean contextually for a story?

When creating a narrative experience, our group wanted to accomplish several goals. One of these was the unfolding, peeling away of the narrative, through layers of discovery. How do you give information out to the player, bit by bit, in reclusive enough amounts, yet not overwhelm them with too much data or exposition in the process?

For our model, we wanted to take an approach somewhat akin to Valve's ideology in Half-Life or Portal: all exposition is experienced firsthand through the player. This means that there are no cut-scenes or no info-dumps--all exposition is contained in the player's experience. Inevitably, this may require the player to start in a state of confusion: where am I, who am I, what am I doing here (and so on)? The key after this is to slowly reveal these answers to convey the narrative. Portal does this through Glados' ever-increasing ramblings about the back-story of the Aperture science test labs. Half-Life does this through the radio chatter on the mega phones and through the idle banter of the citizens in line to get processed for evaluation. At the beginning of those games, the player does not know what is going on, but by moving through the environment, the player slowly receives more and more exposition.

So, back to the spaceship--How do you tell the players what they're doing on the space ship, what is its mission, what the other inhabitants are doing there, and everything else therefore associated with the spaceship? Taking in the aforementioned strategy, this means revealing the story one step at a time: who am I, what is my mission, and what is my relationship to the other inhabitants of the ship? After that, the player can move on to other, broader questions, such as, what is the ship doing, what is its goal, and its ultimate destination? In terms of contextual storytelling, that is one narrative solution that we proposed.

What do the rest of you think? Any other methods of narrative storytelling in games you find unique, interesting, or useful?

Kelsey Sharpe--Week 5--Does Playable Equal Relatable?

One of the things our group has been going back and forth on lately is the playability or non-playability of our main character. I feel as though this debate arises from the fact that we'd like to design a game based around teambuilding and team-oriented missions. Below are some thoughts about playable and non-playable main characters.

Playable: Our story kicks off with our main character and the narrative arc is largely based around his experiences. While the other characters are drawn into the story and are equally as affected as he is, it seems as though it may be prudent to keep the focus on the character with whom we are most heavily invested. If we begin the game from this character's perspective, and then suddenly the player realizes that this isn't even the character that they're controlling, will they lose interest? Can they relate as much to someone who they aren't directly controlling? We can still have other playable characters, but the player will know who they're meant to identify with.

Non-Playable: If we want to highlight a team of diverse and multiply-talented characters, what better way then to throw the player right into controlling them and playing around with their skills? If we try to keep the player oriented around one playable main character, then what encourages them to experiment with the other characters and the various combinations of the other characters? By denying one main character the spotlight, we allow everyone in our cast to shine and to have a rich background story woven into our main narrative. Some people might be turned off by the idea of a non-playable character being at the heart of the game's narrative because it hasn't really been done before-- but maybe that risk will pay off.

What does everybody else think? Does a game need a playable main character to be relatable, or will having a cast of unique characters make the game more relatable to a wider range of people?

Roni - response to Susanne's post

Roni Lancaster - 2/5/2010

Interesting article. It definitely seems to be one-sided. I'm not much of a video game player, personally, but I've never taken such an abrasive attitude toward the medium. I've played just enough to know that there are a lot of games out there that do have story, and seem to be the better for it. Actually, the ones with story are the ones I enjoy playing more - when I get the chance to play, that is. I had a roommate once who is a big aficionado of video games. And he was far from what this article stereotypes as the typical gamer.

I know there are different types/styles of games out there, but I'm enjoying what we're doing in this class, and in our group. I've definitely gained a lot of respect for the process of coming up with a story for a video game. I like the group aspect of being able to toss around ideas with other people. I've found that it helps (at least me) iron out inconsistencies, or to problem solve story issues. Whenever I've tried to write something for myself I always reach a point where I'm not sure where to go next with the story. With a group dynamic, bouncing ideas off of other people is really helpful. Granted, sometimes there are too many ideas when working in a group, and the whittling down of ideas can often be as much of a challenge as getting past the initial story hurdle. But overall I find I'm enjoying the process. And as I said before, my respect for story writers [for video games] has increased.

Susanne Wejp-Olsen - 2/3/2010 - II
Here's a comment that I read in the Hollywood Reporter - it's from a blog "discussion" about whether it's "cooler" to work on movies or video games. Though not particularly well articulated, I thought it was abrasive enough in its tone to perhaps spur a - much nicer - discussion between us wether story really matters in Video Games - or if we're more or less wasting our time because the audience would rather just shoot and score.
Here's the HR blog excerpt:

Video games are disposable, and are generally geared for "the kids". They are also a completely, totally different thing, and deliver a different form of entertainment.

Not even sure the comparison is really valid. I mean, no one is going to *not* see AVATAR because there's no joystick included, and I doubt my old mom would want to sit down with a fresh copy of "Rainbow Six" for her birthday, as opposed to watching, say, a "Little House on the Prairie" re-run on cable.

No harm to ya, don'cha know?

I'm not in the business for any reason other than telling great "non-interactive" stories for the screen, as best I can, whether in a collaborative situation, or not. I have no interest in creating stories for video games, mainly because it's not a discerning audience, therefore not an audience I care to reach.

As an extension of something I've created? Great. No problem. Everything in its place, right?

Video games are like porn: Few care for anything other than the "action". Story? Scenery? A total backseat to mindless shooting, punching, and (if you're lucky) puzzle-solving.

Who talks about the "story" on any of these games? No one. They come for the firearms. Or the swords. Or the race cars.

Not for the story.

Watch any enormous teenager sitting in front of an Xbox for hours on end. Think he's there, shouting into his headset and blasting everything in sight for the STORY?

Nyet.

As for the studios, they are not the only game in town. And, I know of at least one company with plans in the works to become a major, studio-splitting paradigm, a place where unsung talent will be nurtured and allowed to prosper alongside the "old pros".

Somehow, they plan to do this with completely original projects, too. And also have video game spin-offs, where appropriate.

Imagine that.

Posted by: Heigh Ho | January 20, 2010 at 01:12 AM