Dead Space: Extraction is a game that knows what it wants to be. Within a series that wears its horror film influences on its sleeve Extraction is the most direct translation of those influences to the video game form. As an on-rails shooter the cinematography and pacing are an obvious point of comparison sharing as they do […]
Category: Narrative Design
Articles on the potential of interactive storytelling in games, and narrative design in general.
Games are full of choices, moments where players have the ability to select between two mutually or at least partially exclusive options. They can also frequently present possibilities that are closer to The Magician’s Choice, an illusion of choice if not a choice itself. Both ways of determining future actions have their place, for the moment I want to […]
Building off the initial framework outlined in Part 1 these additional concepts serve to provide means of structure and control. The primary appeal of this model is that it marries dramatic character development with player agency while potentially allowing for more variation than can efficiently be achieved through the use of branching narratives alone. For […]
One of the manifold strengths of games is their ability to codify and contextualise interaction and through that provoke a sense of agency and investment. At the heart of stories, and vital to their ability to provoke emotional reactions, are characters in conflict with each other, either directly or indirectly. If we are to even […]
Next week witnesses the beginning of a new phase for this site. Starting Monday evening (GMT) Groping The Map is a series of in depth examinations of a single level. Each new instalment will see me take a detailed look at a game level from the past several years that has been personally memorable or […]
Categories
Living with your mistakes.
Structurally Mass Effect 2 is built around the concept of recruiting a team to participate in a ‘suicide mission’. Each new character recruited has their own specific quest line, a part of their lives they feel compelled to resolve before committing fully to a task that may lead to their own demise. These loyalty quests […]
In the interests of pacing it’s not uncommon for action games, and first person shooters in particular, to vary the style of gameplay over the course of the game as a whole, and over the course of individual levels. This variation of gameplay style leads to a variation in the aesthetic experience of play, and […]
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Who are you?
Who is Gordon Freeman? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The elements of his character that can be said to be fixed, are insubstantial and provide little that is definitive. In reality there are a hundred thousand Gordon Freemans, a million. Each person who plays Half-Life has a subtly different interpretation of who […]
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Mechanical Definitions.
At a low enough level all game mechanics are the same, we press a button, move a stick, and something happens. Action and Outcome. Process and Result. Context is what allows us to determine if we are moving a ship through space or a counter across a board context is provided by the narrative of the game. If a plot […]
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Contextual Specification.
When it comes to the creation of the common ground in which play occurs, the boundaries themselves can either be embedded or emergent. Embedded boundaries are those defined prior to, and separate from, the act of play itself. They are the rules of the game and the narrative overlaid on those rules. These elements define what […]