Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Game stories

 A lot of games which are interactive claim to allow you to choose your own story, however from watching the video "Telling stories with systems" -https://youtu.be/NyMndWpihTM we can see that with most games it doesn't really matter which choices you make because the games are designed to play out the same, whether you choose to save one character or the other now, the other will still die later on and they will both die the same way in the same place anyway,. If the game gives you a choice in going somewhere they want to take you, you will probably still end up in that place no matter what decision you make because this is how it has been designed. Like it says in the video it would be too much work and money to make hundreds of versions of a game to give players a unique experience, when each of these outcomes would only be seen by a small number of its users. Whats more important is presenting your players with a conflict and letting them feel as though they're in control and allowing them to rely on their own morals to determine the outcomes. 

The article "What every game developer needs to know about story", tells us just that. From reading this I learned the basics of how I would need to to go about creating my own story narrative for a game. It would need at least three acts (Start, Middle and End). This article tells us how "games aren't movies, just like movies aren't plays" even though yes they do all tell stories but differently. Common misconceptions are that "story is dialogue' and that 'story doesn't matter." Dialogue is/can be part of a story but that is not all it is and in this article and in Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the design of Game Narrative, we learn how important story is to a game. Conflict is what makes a story, we have our protagonist and they come face to face with some sort of issue they are given many choices that lead them somewhere which will probably have another item of conflict and this will repeat itself again until orderly life has been restored by the heroes risks and choices and this is what builds a story. The choices in the game are more important than that of the outcomes because this is what gives the player a feeling of control in their story. We are told "Do, don't Show", this is how we allow the player to have that control and become immersed in the game because they feel they are doing it, they are a part of it instead of just watching it like a movie.




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