Note: With this series I’m specifically interested in the way Netrunner expresses fiction through the interactions of its rules. These articles are not intended as analysis of cards in terms of their utility in competitive play. Now we have an understanding of the rules we can explore another elements important to the expression of fiction in Netrunner, […]
Category: Narrative Design
Articles on the potential of interactive storytelling in games, and narrative design in general.
Note: With this series I’m specifically interested in the way Netrunner expresses fiction through the interactions of its rules. These articles are not intended as analysis of cards in terms of their utility in competitive play. Netrunner is a two player competitive card game that takes place within the Android universe, a fictional setting created by Fantasy Flight Games […]
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Teenagers Are Strange.
I joked on Twitter that Life Is Strange has taught me that twenty-something male critics sure have some deeply held opinions on the speech patterns of teenage girls. It’s the default criticism of this game, “the dialogue is bad”, like “the level design is good” it’s a meaningless criticism when not expanded upon. My first time through […]
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the ending of Catherine. Catherine, Atlus’s 2011\12 visual novel puzzle game amalgamation is a game I’ve seen cited as “one of the most sexist” games made and another example of “the weird Japanese and their games about sex”. I don’t have much interest getting into the racism and ethnocentrism of that […]
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Discovering my Destiny.
Guest Post, written by: Caitlin Moore. I don’t play shooters. We had GoldenEye when I was a kid but I only ever played against my brother and I’ve mostly avoided them since. I was initially drawn to Destiny despite this for a couple reasons. Partly it’s a function of dating a guy who is writing […]
Note: This was originally posted as a comment on the Sparky Clarkson article I link to. As I was writing I realised there was a broader point to be made, so I extended and adapted that comment into this article. Sparky Clarkson didn’t like Remember Me as much as I did; reading his analysis helped […]
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Laid To Rest.
Guest Post, written by: Caitlin Moore. For me, the most unambiguously happy part of Gone Home was the conclusion of Oscar’s story. This may seem a strange thing to say give the accepted reading of his story (since confirmed by the developers), that he abused his nephew Terrence, the father of both the player and […]
The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home is a game with a very specific legacy. Beyond simply the referential filing cabinet code, this is a game that strongly evokes the storytelling techniques and style of Looking Glass Studios. Nearly twenty years ago System Shock was released, allowing players to explore and uncover the fate of Citadel Station and its […]
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The role of her life.
In his 2011 GDC presentation, The Identity Bubble – A Design Approach To Character and Story Creation, designer Matthias Worch builds on the work of Gary Fine (From his book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds), using the conceptual model of frames to examine how players have multiple, often conflicting, internal voices. During play they are at […]
In any simulated system there are boundaries, points at which the model being used breaks down, where player behaviour is no longer accounted for. The most obvious of these are the physical boundaries of the game space, the chasm too wide to cross or the wall too high to climb. To a large extent the methods for […]