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.