Nonlinear Storytelling in Games: Deconstructing the Varieties of Nonlinear Experiences. What is “the mark of the narrative”? In chapter 1 of her book, Marie-Laure Ryan, discusses the transmedial nature of narrative and gives a broad definition provided by H. Porter Abbott: Narrative is the combination of story and discourse.
I believe the distinction of story and discourse is quite novel and under-appreciated in the area of interactive storytelling. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to deconstruct the nonlinear in narrative to give deeper insight into what this relationship between story and discourse actually entails. (Spoilers for Facade in the following sections.) Level 1 – Story-level Nonlinear Do ‘stories’ ever start where they start? In a previous post, I wrote about amnesia in games. A more concrete example of the story-discourse discrepancy is in the interactive narrative Facade.
Level 2 – Discourse-level Nonlinear I find that breaking chronology is one type of nonlinear, but the linearity of a story depends on more than just the temporal. Temporal. Dramatica & Non-linear Game Theory | Dramaticapedia. In regard to non-linear video game story structuring, in fact, that is where Dramatica excels in ways no other system has been able to achieve. To illustrate how, we need to take a few steps back and then work our way forward again to iterative gaming theory. In the beginning, there was the tale – a simple logical step-by-step progression that described a journey from a point of inception to a destination, documenting the key events along the way.
This evolved into a more complex form that included not only the logical progression, but the passionate progression as well – a heart-line in addition to a head-line. A head-line says, “This leads to this leads to that.” A heart-line says, “This feeling evolved into this feeling resulting in that feeling.” Either of these linear progressions is referred to as a simple “tale” in Dramatica theory. There is also a complex tale form in which these two linear progressions interact and alter the course either would have taken on its own.
Like this: The rebirth of turn-based strategy games. Firaxis Games's "XCOM: Enemy Unknown," a new turn-based strategy game, is slated to debut in October. Turn-based strategy games are reminiscent of board gamesFiraxis Games' "Civilization" series is one of the best turn-based strategy franchises"Civ V's" lead designer says the bar is high for these strategy gamesGames today can be more interactive as people become more connected online (CNN) -- As video game technology improves, games are getting quicker, deadlier and more reactive. This, in some cases, is requiring gamers to be faster on the draw, more reflexive in their actions and to be able to act with little time for a thought-out strategy. One gaming genre, however, prefers to slow things down while still maintaining a high degree of action and planning.
At Firaxis Games near Baltimore, the company continues to create one of the best turn-based strategy franchises with its "Civilization" series. "I think it is unique to strategy games," he said. 5 games to watch from Comic-Con Pong! Kickstarter failures revealed! What can you learn from Kickstarter failures? [INFOGRAPHIC] | Appsblogger.com. See the full infographic below. For the first time ever, the Kickstarter failure numbers are revealed.* I recently came across Dan Misener’s article, Kickstarter hides failure, where he talked about how Kickstarter makes it difficult for you to see/find failed projects.
They intentionally prevent failed campaigns from being indexed by the search engines (through “noindex” robot meta tags). Dan’s article got quite a bit of attention. What is the percentage of successful vs. failed projects? As an entrepreneur who’s looking at Kickstarter as a potential source of funding, I’m very interested in these numbers and the insights they provide. To get these questions answered, I had a scraper script written (not by me) that was able to scrape all the projects as of June 2, 2012, including those that failed to achieve their funding goal. With these numbers in hand, I was able to create the infographic below which provides insights that were previously unavailable. Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War | Wired Magazine. The USB memory stick contained the sole copy of a videogame unlike any created before. Photo: Jason Pietra Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs.
He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He doesn’t own a car or believe in vaccination. The 33-year-old works out of a home office, typing code in a duct-taped chair. He takes his son Mez to gymnastics and acting class on his lime-green recumbent bicycle, and on weekends he paints with his son Ayza. (He got Mez’s name from a license plate, and Ayza’s by mixing up Scrabble tiles.) On the morning of February 24, Rohrer took a break from coding and pedaled to the local Best Buy. The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. Rohrer unveiled Chain World at the 2011 Game Design Challenge, held on March 4 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.