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.