Stories-telling

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This is the very last post. Whew.

I’m a great fan of Sid Meier’s games, especially Railroads, and I can see how his definition of quality gameplay as a series of interesting choices is reflected in his games. Choice has been a big part of our discussion of interactivity as well, and I think Sid Meier’s description can be equally applied to interactivity. Good interactivity is also a series of interesting choices.

When good interactivity and narrative have to merge, we are often stumped, because there is a tension between telling a good story, and giving the player interesting choices but still not disrupt the story we want to tell.

I believe one way of approaching this problem  is to stop thinking of using interactive media for storytelling. Instead, we can use interactive media for ’stories-telling’. Why try to tell just one coherent story? What we could do instead is to allow the player to make informed interesting choices at key points, and allow the story to develop according to the choice he chooses. It would not matter which choice he chose, because the narratives are effectively disassociated with one another.

The player’s choices would determine the story he sees, leaving all the other ‘potential stories’ out. In this case, there would be no problem of choice, because the developers and players have two different experiences of choice. For the player, he has made a series of interesting choices, and felt the satisfaction of interactivity. For the developer, any single story that the player walks through has been predetermined, thus the player has no choice.

This sounds good in theory, but there are also many niggling problems. For example, there is the question of whether the effort of creating this much content is worth the experience. Nonetheless, ’stories-telling’ is a viable model for both developers and players in terms of telling stories in games, as well as providing an interactive experience.

I love bees is much more than university orientation

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This is the 9th post (penultimate post! You will be relieved from UAR2205 blog posts soon!)

I went online to look at what I love bees and The Beast is about, and I thought McGonigal’s dumbed down these alternate reality games. By a lot. Reading the paper, I often wondered how this applied to our module, because none of the narrative components of the game were mentioned in the paper at all. It sounded like there was this bunch of crazy fans who gathered in one spot and did whatever they were told, adding their own interpretations to the game script.  It wasn’t intuitively clear to me how this was fun. Why should I obey the commands of these random idiots? As mentioned by some classmates, this concept sounds exactly like orientation.

The two alternate reality games, however, are nothing like that. These people first came into contact with the game via various means. They saw something abnormal happen in a supposedly normal world, and took an interest in it. In Matrix terms, they took the red pill. They saw something interesting, and asked questions, trying to find out what was wrong.

More importantly, there was development in what was happening. Solving a puzzles led to more puzzles, and it became clearer how all the parts fit together. The players felt like they had control over what happens, and they could change something, because the game responded. One excellent example is how the game developed responses to the community of people who had gathered online to discuss this phenomenon and what they should do about it. These forum conversations were incorporated into the narrative, which indicate the possibility of affecting the game world.

“This is not a game”, is an excellent guide for these alternate reality games, and I feel this is the closest I’ve seen interactivity and narrative go hand in hand. Even better than Facade, actually. Now if only they stopped asking people to take off their pants accidentally.

How does the treatment of time in discourse affect interactivity?

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This is the 8th post

I thought I’d use this week’s post to write about my ideas for my term paper idea. Mr. Mitchell, I’m assuming that this is equivalent to sending you a sentence or two about my paper topic. (Alright, this is a 300 word sentence or two.)

I’d like to explore whether the portraying time in different ways has an effect on the interactivity of different discourse. This is inspired by Scott McCloud’s treatment of time in comics. In comics, time frames are depicted by sounds (word balloons and sound effects) and motion (panel to panel closure and motion within panels).

Time is an issue all narratives have to deal with. The story must follow a certain temporal flow. The discourse, however, may choose different methods of presenting the story to us, in terms of time.

Movies and books, for example, typically show us the story in a linear fashion. Momento is a movie where we are shown the story backwards, and it worked well.

253, the hypertext fiction, tells us about 253 people on a subway, and this is only a few minutes of “real time”, but we take considerably longer to get through the entire work. Does this treatment of time make the narrative more interactive?

In Glass, the text adventure game, time goes on even if we do nothing at all. If we do the right thing at the right time, then we may get responses and results. In many role playing games, we can take as long as we want to start a quest. The quest will be available for you forever, and you can take as long as you want to complete it, no matter how “critical” or “urgent” that quest may be. Which treatment of time is more interactive? Which treatment of time gives a more well-formed narrative?

How has time played a part in my projects? For project 1, we chopped up the pieces of the story into bite size segments, allowing each person about 1.5 min for each segment. Did this have an effect on interactivity?

I apologize for the random thoughts. I needed to pen them down somewhere, and this is a good spot. I finish the post this week and think about my paper at the same time!

Does interactivity add anything to a well formed narrative?

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This is the 7th post.

I have always felt that the narrative in a game should take precedence over all other aspects. I’m a sucker for an epic story with twists and turns as I progress through the game, and my gold standard is Final Fantasy 7. It has an amazing story that propelled me towards role playing games ever since, spending hundreds of hours to finish the story that the creators want to tell.

This week’s readings made me wonder about whether interactivity adds anything to the narrative in a computer game, especially one with a well formed narrative like Final Fantasy 7. The game resides on level 3 of Ryan’s 4 layers of interactivity, giving the user control over the protagonists in the fixed story and limited freedom. The narrative is very linear in the early stages, but eventually expands till you can roam anywhere around the world as and when you like. This format allowed a great narrative to evolve, while incorporating many interactive elements.

There are concerns about the replayability of such games: if you already know the story, why would you play it again? I believe this is akin to reading an excellent novel, or watching a great film. You want to back again and again, to see if you left anything out, or if you can learn new things from it. Momento is one good example. After I know the ending, I want to watch it again to see where all the links are.

In this sense, I feel that if the addition of a higher level of interactivity reduces the quality of the narrative, it would not be worth the effort. I play the game for the story it tells, not the interaction it provides. If I wanted interaction, I’d go talk to a person.

Of course, this is a heavily biased view, for I’m one of those crazy fans who WILL buy the graphically updated version of it, even if there was no change in the story, and no additions.

There is also the question of adding interactivity to games that tell a very unsatisfying story, such as normal first person shooters. Would adding interactivity add to the story then? But I’ve hit my word limit.

How does choice affect computer games?

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This is the 6th post.

We just finished the first part of the course, which focused on narrative in interactive media. As we move into the second part, which focuses more on play and games, I tried asking some questions about games, in the same way we asked questions about narratives.

A tough one I encountered was: “Can one game be more interactive than another?” For narratives, we sort of came to a conclusion that choice is an important component of interactivity, because it allows the feedback loop to work. All games, however, have a feedback loop. They could theoretically be considered to be equally interactive. Perhaps the important factor for games would be the quality of the artificial intelligence. The better the AI, the more interactive a game is.

I had an interesting observation about choice in computer games while thinking about the above question. It seems that giving the user more choice in computer games makes it easier for the user to create a narrative in the game world.

The Sims is a good example of what I am describing. It is an interactive game that offers an enormous amount of choice for the user, but does not come with its own narrative. What has happened, however, is that people are using the game to create narratives, because of the sheer amount of control they have over what the characters do and the locations and situations they are in.

In contrast, playing a tennis game on a Wii is equally interactive. However, the user does not have much choice other than which direction to run and what kind of spin to put on the ball. This seriously limits the ability of the user to create narratives using this particular game.

Choices, it seems, play a different role when applied to narratives and games.

What about narratives that are “in develpoment”?

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This particular post is about blogs!

Both readings this week deal with hypertext fiction in the sense that they are finished works. These works are ‘finished’ and displayed for the public to access and experience. In relation to these works, however, blogs seem to be a place where it is possible to create hypertext fiction that is always “in development”. The very structure of blogs allows for linking between different articles, different tags, different chronologies. These are the basic elements for creating a hypertext narrative.

The difference, of course, is that once the first post is published, the public is allowed to access it. Via the comments function, they can even leave their thoughts and feelings on the post, creating a form of interaction. If this unfinished narrative is interesting, the public will come back time and again to visit it, to see how the story develops. In this sense, there need not be a sense of ‘closure’ each time the user comes back. Things could be made simple for new users by linking critical incidents back to the relevant posts in the past as well, thus allowing users to navigate to any previously published point if they choose to do so in order to understand the narrative.

One drawback of using blogs as a medium, however, is that there can only be one closure instead of multiple ones. Since the story is always in development, users do expect some form of continuity and logic between all the posts. Would it be possible to create multiple endings, I wonder?

This blog idea might have been a good one for our first project. We could have taken a story, wrote it in the form of a journal, and posted in over a period of time. There would also be links to different posts with certain key words, so that users can jump around. The interactivity would come from replies to comments in the blog posts, the ability to link to other posts any way you want, and maybe even incorporation of ideas from the comments into the main story. Feedback takes a longer time, but no one expects a journal to be updated minute by minute right? The only problem would be how to replicate the passage of time within 30 minutes in class. Perhaps we would need someone to publish posts only after the user has read the preceding ones.

Does subtraction lead to more interactivity?

We couldn’t really determine what computer games add to an interactive experience that a fighting fantasy book could not. Some of us tried to say “In computer games, we get many more choices”, but this was refuted with “We can generate all those choices in a book if we wanted to; it would just be an exceedingly long book”.  This line of argument does show that choices aren’t it.

There was one thing that did strike me in the discussion: Almost all of us agreed that computer games helped by removing some of the non-interactive menial tasks, like keeping track of our statistics, for instance.

Does the removal of non-interactive tasks equal to more interactivity? I’m not too sure, but my intuitive answer is no.

Taking this to the world of comics, comics are still frames that have a sequence. For example, the first frame can have two people. Person A has his fist pulled back with a menacing stare, and person B looks surprised. In the second frame, person A is walking away, and person B is lying on the floor with a black eye.

Between the frames in a comic, we imagine what goes on. In this case, comics remove the action, and we imagine person A punching person B in our minds. For some reason, this removal of action appears to make comics more interactive, because now I can imagine how the action unfolds. Maybe it was a quick punch. Maybe it was a slow punch. Maybe a few punches were thrown in between, but one punch landed.

It seems to me that we removed a non-interactive element (the scenes between the frames), but we somehow added interactivity instead.

Perhaps thats the kind of interactivity that we experience from computer games. Perhaps, computer games are at the same level of interactivity as fighting fantasy books, but computer games are able to provide more of the same kind of interactivity, which makes it seem more interactive.

I’m not sure whether I’m making any sense now. Maybe I need a framework. Ha.

How do you know you’re supposed to destroy the ring?

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. This week’s reflections, however, is based on an exercise we did in class.

We had an interesting exercise in our narrative and play class on Tuesday, which was about adding interactivity to the story Little Red Riding Hood. Ambreen represented our group, and I liked the way she told the story. Basically what our group did was to ask the user to take the point of view of the hunter, and make various decisions along the way on how and when he wanted to kill the wolf, while making sure he gained prestige as well. I didn’t really know what we were doing, until Alex said that we were trying to align the user’s objective to the story’s objective.

Interactive Media and Narrative

For my module UAR2205: Narrative and Play in Interactive Media, I have to post once a week (about 300 words) to satisfy the module requirements. Reflections are based on assigned readings. Here’s the second.

Chatman implies in his writings that a medium may specialize in certain media but not others. For example, the cinema often must portray visual details, but can forgo, or finds it difficult, to portray a person’s thoughts. A verbal narrative, however, excels in telling a person’s thoughts and feelings, but omits most visual details. What does interactive media bring to the narrative then?

What makes a game work?

 

I was shocked when she died. I had spent hours training her, and now she was motionless on the floor. This can’t be true. Main characters don’t just die like that. Not in a game.

Sephiroth. Now you’re no longer just Cloud’s enemy. You’re my enemy too. Heck, I am Cloud.

That was me in 1998, when I played Final Fantasy 7 (FF7) on the Playstation. It defined for me what a game should be. A game should first and foremost, tell a story. I realized that when my narrative and play class discussed choice as a factor while playing games.