Lee Sheldon stopped by the ETC today and he told us:
Some stories are fit for a Haiku and some for an epic novel
I am very happy to say that the two blog posts that I have re-published in my Gamasutra Blog have been featured shortly after their publication in the front page of Gamasutra. The Phantom Hourglass post was featured last week and the “Games mechanics that tell stories” post was featured at the end of June. Also, the latter was chosen as Gamasutra’s top standout member blog for the week it was released on, back on June 29th.
I encourage everyone interested in writing about design to go and open up a Gamasutra blog, since they are good with catching interesting posts and featuring them in their home page.
This piece will spoil a big part of inFAMOUS and even a bit of Bioshock So be warned. SPOILERS below.
The general consensus is that it’s healthy to stay away from the notepad when hotheaded, inflamed or when in any other situation when reason might be compromised. But for games, and storytelling, I feel like the exact opposite may be best.
I have just finished playing through inFAMOUS and I’m ready to speak my mind - hot as it might be.
Read the rest of this entry »
I just finished Metal Gear Solid 4 after a 15 hour-long playing session - almost one full year after its original release - and I feel like I should say something, like I should get off my couch and salute it with a nostalgic look on my face. Read the rest of this entry »
Even though we are all still searching for the ultimate interactive storytelling experience, it is hardly arguable that video games have made progress in bringing slices of interaction into storytelling or, given their nature, storytelling into interaction. They have managed to do this in many ways, some of them definitely more effective than others, including examples such as Indigo Prophecy, KOTOR or Story Machine games such as Civilization or any sports game.
But there is a particular kind of interactive storytelling that I find more compelling than the others, even though I do not really think it holds the key to the zenith of interactive storytelling. I am talking about game mechanics that tell stories: player interactions that are charged with meaning and go beyond simple button presses – they are translated into story elements that bring us closer to the characters and closer to the story. Read the rest of this entry »
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”.
