Ideally, a video game’s story should react to your actions as a player. How you play the game should affect the story. And yet, that fascination with interactive storytelling lends itself to problems about how we approach a given game – or maybe even games in general. To what extent might your own approach continually funnel you toward a specific ending? In this essay I explore the conundrum of trying to mesh interaction and storytelling and the strange dilemma that faces developers.
Tag Archives: video games
The Struggle of Predicting Players
Sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones that mess with you in some way. But messing with the audience in some way requires predicting how people will react – if you miss the setup, then the payoff never hits. But no matter how hard we try, perfectly predicting the audience is impossible, and it is important to examine the ways in which those predictions can go wrong, and what that means for us.
Being Comfortable with Our Own Judgments
Gatekeeping is a frustrating component of enjoying games. People who seek to tell us the right games to play and the right way to play them ruin the experience of gaming itself. And yet, we tend to let these people not just dominate the conversation, but dominate our own perceptions of games. In this essay I will be exploring the social problems that prevent us from really being comfortable with not liking a game – especially when that game is popular.
Fun with Friends
Just a brief essay on different experiences playing games with friends.
“You Should Try This Game”
As people who love playing video games, we love to share that interest with others. And that can include sharing it with people who don’t play games themselves. Meaning that we often face the problem of “what game should I suggest to introduce this person to video games?” However, in this essay I explain how this question is more complex than we normally treat it, and how we should instead approach this problem.
On Storytelling: The Promise of Mystery
Mysteries can be fun and engaging, and hold a lot of promise when a player can be the main character. Yet, so many games that offer mysteries end up falling short. Where do they go wrong? In this essay I will be looking at some ways in which games that hold the promise of a mystery end up not making good on that promise.
Watch Where You’re Going
Have you ever struggled with a camera in a game? Ever been unsure where you’re going relative to the rest of the world? This brief essay covers some basic issues of camera orientation in games and why they cause such annoyance for players.
Collectathon-athon
The “collectathon” as a game genre has always been a bit weird. And attempts to capture the old spirit of collectathons in modern games have fallen short, sometimes in a big way. I use this essay to examine a few different entries in the genre to investigate what a collectathon is and what makes them fun…or annoying.
On Storytelling: Narrative across Media
Video game stories can often be so big that they can’t be contained in a single game. We need a whole series of games. Or maybe even games and books and movies. But how does trying to tell a single cohesive story in this way affect the actual narrative(s) that we get?
On Storytelling: Interaction and Player Knowledge
What makes a story that is unique to video games? We usually focus on the player’s ability to shape the narrative. But this essay will explore how a different form of interaction – the player’s understanding of systems – can lead to a unique storytelling experience.
Abstracting Games 