Week 6

This week we have been discussing two different papers.

In the first one we have a fight between the concepts story and plot, and how it does affect the way the story is told in games. The story is seen as a global story, events, and backgrounds, while the plot is the way the story is developed as the player plays the game.

This way, while the story is the same for everyone, the plot could be different, and the experience could be different for every player, even for the same player in different runs through the same game.

An important topic discussed is the monolythic system. Although some people seem to be against, there are a lot of games that could be represented with it. The point is not following the structure exactly but using it as a reference. The idea is abstracting that concept so people do not realize, because if the story is always a repetition of the same pattern, people would start ignoring it.

Anyways, sometimes is good to use a established pattern, because people like it. We can see this in most commercial movies, for instance, romantic movies. All of them have share the same core concepts and the story always ends as people expect; however, they are still successful. Sometimes people do not want to worry about the story, just have a good time with it. Because of this, the monolythic idea is still a good way of telling stories.

The second paper is related to abstraction in games. Everything in a game is (and has to be) an abstraction. In a game, you don't care about most of the things you should in real life, because that's what usually makes the game fun: focusing on gameplay and not in every single detail. It is true that we are, therefore, limiting the freedom in the game, but a lot of people play games just as a way to escape from reality. It would make no sense to make games so real.

Moreover, abstractions are made as a mix of conventions, which defines a game genre. Gamers are used to some concepts inside a genre so the abstraction is made base on that assumed knowledge.

Week 4

This week the article is focused on the relationship between games and story. The author seems to be quite objective, considering both sides of the discussion: ludologists' one and narratologists' one.

There are a lot of different types of games, and we should not try all of them to follow one pattern or another. Some games have an important narrative focus, while others just do not care about it, or try to tell the story in a different way.

When game stories try not to be linear, the player has more freedom. This way, the story can try to be self-contained, so the order in which the events happen is not so important. The story can also told via the environment, and there is a lot of discussion about it in the article.

This can be seen in, for instance, World of Warcraft, they game I am going to analyze for the presentation of this module. The story is usually self-contained in each area, so skipping one zone does not affect the player experience. Moreover, there are a lot of elements in the environment that shows previous events in the game story. This could be seen as a good way to create immersion, but the problem with the game is that is very old, and has had a lot of upgrades over the years. For example, when the third expansion came out the classic zones (used for low level characters) were revamped. The story in the new zones took into account the story so far. The problem was when the character leveled up and went into the zones of the first expansion (which zones were not revamped). The player felt like travelling to the past, and the immersion is kind of lost.

One of the main examples about different ways of storytelling is theme parks. Theme parks are designed as an experience, not a story. They usually are trying more to evoke a story than telling that story, but that also implies that the person needs to have previous knowledge to really enjoy it. Anyways, a very important point related to theme parks is the immersion they achieve.

The problem when the player has so much freedom is that the story has to be told in short self-contained pieces with the help of other elements such as the environment. This fact can make it difficult to create memorable moments in the game story, the "ceremony". Even if the game have the narrative elements distributed in different ways, there is also a necessity to have a balance between freedom and narrative.

Week 3

This week we have been talking about how interactive media, and more specifically games, are very good ways for storytelling.

Since printing press until some years ago, stories have been linear. From a book to a movie, the story was set from the beginning, and the user was just going through that story as an observer. One of the main features why interactive media is having such an impact is because of its ability to allow this observer to actually change the story.

In the article we have read, this storytelling is called "cyberdrama". It includes a main concept, according to the author: agency.

Agency is the power the user has to change what is happening in the story. A lot of modern games are including this more and more often, with lots of different side-stories or endings, or even completely different experiences according to player choices.

We could say choices are good, and players like them. They allow the player to create their own story, it adds replayability, but choices are not only what people need. It is nice if you can create your own story, but sometimes people want to experience a "good" story, a story they like because the argument, the characters or what happens in the world. When the story is created by a writer, even if it's a linear one (i.e. in games like Final Fantasy X), the story and the characters can be developed in the way the writer chooses. The player has no influence in the results of the story, but the player has to succeed in some challenges so both the game and the story continue. In a game with a lot of freedom, the writer cannot develop the story so well, because he does not know what the player has experienced before in the story. Every step in the story should be independent enough so every player could understand what is happening without having listened to the same previous stories. For this reason, the story cannot be developed so well by the author, and the story could be worse for some player than others.

To sum up, choices are good, but they are not a "panacea". There should be a balance between choices and storytelling, so we can still have freedom while experiencing a well-written story.

Week 1

This week, the basics of narrative in games have been discussed in class.

One of the main points is that games are very important nowadays in different aspects, so there is a necessity for games to be studied. Therefore, it is important to study research methods and technical aspects about games design and narrative.

In one of the articles, games are shown as part of the culture (seen as a way of living, mix of desires, traditions, society, and so on). They are also even compared to science, since both share some challenges that must be accomplished, following different strategies, to get a result.

So, in general, games are seen as important by both the society and researchers.

Another issue is the difficulty to tell if games are inherently narrative or they could have no story. Some people state that, even if a game has no story elements, the environment and the images will tell a subtle story. We have to go back in time until games like Pong so that these statements could not be true (it is not easy to create a story based on Pong).

One of the other topics have to be with fiction in games. Are they fictitious or real? Could something that happens in a screen be real or realistic? For that, we should define what fiction means to us. Anyways, do we really want games to be realistic? Most people states that games are a way to escape from reality, so fiction is something that works very well with them.

So, we have discussed very basic topics about what games mean to us, the society and how we see them.