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.