Articles on the potential of interactive storytelling in games, and narrative design in general.
Having now read Patrick Redding’s Austin Game Developers Conference presentation (“Familiarity Breeds Contempt: Building Game Stories That Flow”) it’s interesting to see how dissimilar our thinking is on the matters of flow and story. It seems Patrick believes the role of the story is to help with flow itself, something that serves liable to make the story […]
Note: This was originally written as response to some elements of Clint’s presentation, before I got stuck on the notion of logical immersion as flow and from there the concept of story flow. Maybe if I’d been paying more attention I’d have read Pat Redding’s presentation before I made this post. As it is I’ll be […]
A core property of games as is that of interactivity, digital games especially so. Computers are interactive, therefore computer games are interactive, but does interactivity operate on a binary scale? Is something either interactive or not? If it’s not a binary scale does a game require a certain degree of interactivity? One title that has been criticised for […]
Any discussion of storytelling in games is going to run up against a barrier at some point due simply to the nature of games as (in very loose terms) “interactive systems governed by rules” seems to run counter to what defines a story. I personally prefer the term narrative as it doesn’t have the same connotations […]
Though nobody cares about your stupid story it’s likely that it’s not entirely down to the audience and their preconceptions of games. There are people who do see games as a storytelling medium, whether they consider that to be their primary function or not. This is something that Ken Levine went on to discuss in his GDC presentation, […]
The role of narrative in games, and the relationship between story and gameplay, has been an important topic at this years Game Developers Conference. Once again developers seemed unable to agree on the importance of narrative in games. The first person to speak up specifically about the role of stories in games was Ken Levine, President […]