Designing game narrative
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Designing game narrative
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Re: Designing game narrative
#2We can put people on the Moon and smash protons to pieces, but we can't handle apostrophes.
Re: Designing game narrative
#3We can put people on the Moon and smash protons to pieces, but we can't handle apostrophes.
We USED to be able to put people on the moon. Sigh.
Re: Designing game narrative
#4Half-Life 1 did this so well. It was primarily a shooter, but if you followed closely you could get a story arch. You never lost control of you character and every cutscene was optionable( except the very first and last, you still need some pacing ). This is why I consider Half-Life 2 an inferior game, even though it does everything else better, you constantly get into situations where the main characters talk for several minutes and you can only watch and wait. HL1's gameplay flows, HL2 is a stop-and-go.
Re: Designing game narrative
#5Dark Souls and Demon Souls, two games normally only noted for being extremely difficult, are some of the best examples of ludonarrative assonance I've ever seen. The mechanics of the games not only reflect the events of their plots cohesively, but also serve as metaphors towards larger aesthetic and philosophical themes shared by the stories and settings.
Re: Designing game narrative
#6Half-Life 1 did this so well. It was primarily a shooter, but if you followed closely you could get a story arch. You never lost control of you character and every cutscene was optionable( except the very first and last, you still need some pacing ). This is why I consider Half-Life 2 an inferior game, even though it does everything else better, you constantly get into situations where the main characters talk for se…
I agree, except that even on modern machines HL stops the game every 2 minutes to load the next area (this is especially painful when the train is moving through the intro cutscene.)
Re: Designing game narrative
#7I loved the contrast of Tomb Raider and Portal - interactive, fast thinking rather than "press X to not die" nonsense during a "cutscene".
I also really love the way they break down storytelling axes - dungeons and dragons adds the "interactive" axis without the "AV" one, which presents its own challenges. (if you want a good example of this, I recommend the "critical hit" podcast[1], although be warned you'll need to listen to literally hundreds of hours of people playing D&D, which is not ideal if you're only interested in the story's interactivity.)
I thought they missed a trick not analysing Dishonoured a bit more though, as the game world reflects your playing style (high/low chaos). Which reminds me, I should probably play that game in kill everything/high chaos mode at some point.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/critical-hit-dungeons-dr...
Re: Designing game narrative
#8Half-Life 1 did this so well. It was primarily a shooter, but if you followed closely you could get a story arch. You never lost control of you character and every cutscene was optionable( except the very first and last, you still need some pacing ). This is why I consider Half-Life 2 an inferior game, even though it does everything else better, you constantly get into situations where the main characters talk for se…
I agree, except that even on modern machines HL stops the game every 2 minutes to load the next area (this is especially painful when the train is moving through the intro cutscene.)
Sure, you have to take the limits of their engine into account. The load time is under a second on modern machine and with SSD it is almost instant.
Hopefully HL3( ... ) comes with seamless levels.
Re: Designing game narrative
#9The thread linking the games Mr Lee praises is that they are, to a large extent, sandboxes. Yes, some of them have endings, but they get the player there by dumping them in a world and letting them do what they like.
Portal is the least sandboxy of the games mentioned (maybe apart from Tetris!), in that it has highly structured, intentionally designed levels with well-defined goals, but it still manages to give the player a huge amount of the responsibility for getting through them.
A weaker thread is procedural generation. Dwarf Fortress and Brogue have procedurally generated levels. Journey doesn't, but probably could have done. Portal doesn't, and i doubt could. Tetris kind of does. But that's a higher incidence of procedural generation than in the general population of games. Is there something about procedural generation that intrinsically puts narrative responsibility back in the hands of the player? That seems plausible; a game designer who gives up the power to shape levels explicitly gives up some power to shape stories explicitly. Think also about Civilisation and SimCity; the software is entirely story-free, but any given game of either of those is bursting with stories.
What tests of this hypothesis are coming down the pipe? No Man's Sky is the one that springs to mind.
Re: Designing game narrative
#10An interesting article, gave me much to think about as I'm planning out a game to make.
My thought on it tho, I think the article misses a GOOD use of cutscenes: A good story is all about tension and release, and a cutscene can provide a necessary release from intense gameplay (not that it's the only way).
Am I wrong on this? I'm sure there are differing opinions on this depending on what game genres you enjoy (I'm quite a fan of traditional RPGs).