Story and Challenge at the service of each other
Posted: January 25th, 2009 | Author: fsouki | Filed under: Game Design | Tags: Challenge, Jonathan Blow, Story, Theme | No Comments »After reading this Gamasutra interview with Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid among other things, I found myself immediately disagreeing with some of the things he states.
I agree with him when he describes that two of the driving forces behind games are Challenge and Story and that they usually conflict in such a way that when one tries to advance, the other acts as opposition – meaning that when playing a game it is the Challenge what keeps us from advancing the Story, until the point when the Challenge is beaten and so the Story can go on.
But he also makes it sound as if Challenge is being sacrificed to tell stories that are “typically not good”, which makes for weak games that resemble, from his point of view, “bad movies”.
