1401. Player Agency: How Game Design Affects Narrative - Game Wisdom. Recently I finished played The Wolf Among Us by Telltale games and I enjoyed it for the most part. But one area where I do not like Telltale’s trend is with them dialing back player agency which is the subject for today’s post and how it works at different degrees through the game design. Moving the Story: Player agency is one of those terms like RPGs and replayability that is tough to define. The reason is that it can mean different things for different people and it’s hard to come up with a non subjective definition. For this post and for myself in general, I’m going to define it as the following: Player Agency: The player’s ability to impact the story through the game design or gameplay.
There’s a reason why I have to be that specific with the definition, as there is no video game that plays itself, so the player is always technically involved with moving the story forward. To help us understand what this means, let’s talk about some examples of player agency and those that aren’t. EDU 31. Learning Game Design: Rewards and Scoring | Knowledge Guru. Storytelling Concepts. Gaming Made Me: Nathan Grayson’s Violence. I don’t think violence is necessarily bad. But I do think – especially in gaming – that it’s highly misunderstood, and I argued as much quite recently.
But what can we do about that? As ever, I’m erring on the side of reflection and transparency. So here we are. Walking down an unfamiliar San Francisco street one night, I passed some people. But then I started fantasizing about what would happen if one of them attacked me. First, I’d knock the guy unconscious. Eventually, he’d wake up. As my fantasy faded and I saw the eerily empty street in front of me again, a crystallizing moment provided two epiphanies. The thing that struck me most, though, was that it all rushed in so quickly. One day in elementary school, a teacher pulled me aside from a couple friends I’d been chatting with. “You talk about death and killing a lot,” he said. I was one of those kids. Games. Around the ripe old age of seven, I became obsessed with Warcraft II. Christmas Eve, I am thirteen. There’d been a fight.
Digital-themed Tv. Digital texts. The Best Free Online Resources to Learn Game Development and Gamification - Springboard Blog. Global spending on video games is set to exceed that on movies, and the average 21-year old has racked up 10,000 hours of gaming! The best games and game designers can tap into human psychology in a way that we can all learn something from. Maybe you’re a gamer curious about the psychology of game design? Perhaps you’re a budding developer wanting to create your own video game, but don’t know where to start. Or even an experienced game developer looking to sharpen your skills? I’m curating some of the best online courses and resources on game development, gamification and game psychology. Edit: If you’re new to computer programming, you should first check out our Web Development Learning Path — an extensive 75-hour curriculum of free online courses to learn web development from scratch.
Game Development for Beginners 1. Level: Beginner | Duration: 9 weeks | Next Start Date: Sep 15 2014 | Read reviews 2. Level: Beginner | Duration: 8 weeks | Next Start Date: To be announced | Read reviews 3. Groping The Elephant. Note: This was originally posted as a comment on the Sparky Clarkson article I link to. As I was writing I realised there was a broader point to be made, so I extended and adapted that comment into this article.
Sparky Clarkson didn’t like Remember Me as much as I did; reading his analysis helped me understand my own feelings and why certain types of cinematic action game have a tendency to feel awkward and dishonest. I believe it’s due to a misguided attempt to hide from players that they are taking actions within a fictionalised virtual world that has its own specific rules and limitations; a focus on cinematic as the end rather than the means. I agree that the goal of the “cinematic action game” genre is to “engage the player as closely as possible with the characters and their stories” but I don’t think making systems invisible is the only, or even the best, way of achieving this. Extra Credits: Game Narrative. The Narrative Design Explorer.
The Deus Ex Bible (Rehost) Editor's Note: This document is intended to summarize the key backstory information behind the Deus Ex universe. It is comprised mostly of excerpts from the design documents of Deus Ex 1, with a few additions and modifications for the sake of maintaining consistency with the final game. The hope is that the amount of information will be helpful without being overwhelming. Be aware that much of the backstory detailed below never made it into the final game.
Some of the events described were intended to be missions (Texas, the space station, moon base, Mt. Weather; etc.), and a lot of that content either doesn't appear in Deus Ex or does so in glancing, fragmentary ways. What that means is that the related pieces of backstory should be considered truthful and should be supported whenever possible but not necessarily with religious fervor. Throughout this document, we will be adding comments from members of the team on how the document was created and its vision compared to the final game.
In The Games Of Madness: GDC 2013 Talk. The Script I just finished cleaning up the script for the GDC2013 talk and it can be gotten from here: Additional Resources The following blog posts are probably also of interest: This goes into more depth on how to view a story. Repetition is a problem when presence is a goal. This articles explores the "agreeable action outcome" design some more. Both of these explore the construction of a story space. These articles use the "interaction for presence"-axiom to view puzzles in a new way. These should hopefully help clear out a few things from the talk. I also have a more academic, and much more detailed, version of the talk. This versions does not discuss story-spaces, but provides a lot more rules for how to create interactions that support presence.
Addendum Finally, I wanted to give the question, "Why does Minecraft and Dark Souls, despite being gamey, have such a strong sense of presence? " Using User Research to Improve Game Narratives. Game Design Aspect of the Month: Chasing the Heroine's Journey in Games. In this article, game writer Sande Chen ponders how to find the heroine's journey, or the internal life of characters, in games.
A few months ago, I was fortunate to go to a lecture given by script consultant Dara Marks, author of Inside Story. She spoke of the counterpoint to the Hero's journey, which would be the Heroine's Journey. (Note: This is just terminology and not meant to suggest that female characters cannot follow the Hero's Journey and vice versa!) Dara Marks conveyed that the best stories have the yin and yang of both journeys. Marks' framework for the Heroine's Journey has a Call of Action, Midpoint, and Final Pursuit, just like the Hero's Journey.
It struck me that in the realm of video games, our blockbusters are mostly masculine stories. For other games, it simply doesn't matter because the player-character is a blank slate to be filled in by the player. Here is another issue: the blurry line between player and player-character. Video game confidential: Susan O'Connor at TEDxBeaconStreet.
TGA - Self Expression and the Illusion of Choice In Narrative. Game narratives should be about players shaping and expressing their own experience, not shaping the story itself. By Steven Farrell on Thu Sep 15, 2016 Narrative bounds across games seem to be constantly expanding and contracting along their own respective story spectrums. On one end, narrative is strictly linear but no less rich. Like INSIDE, the narrative events always happen in one order, and each player will experience these events in that order. On the other end, narrative ambitiously attempts to expand with dizzying dialogue trees and “meaningful” choice as in the case of Dreamfall Chapters. The latter ambition is what we’ll to crack into. To be transparent, we’re defining “narrative games” as any game that has a specific plot. Kentucky Route Zero redefines how game narratives are told.
I want to focus on two games in particular, The Witcher 3 and Kentucky Route Zero. Geralt receives a letter and can choose to shoo the expectant delivery boy or give him gold.