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.