Design

Been thinking about narrative and stories in games, and one sleepless night I got an idea. I will now ramble a bit about it.

I'm of the oppinion that games are not stories. If you want a story you should read a book or see a movie. These are both superb mediums at telling stories.

Stories in games are actually the actions the player take. The moves, choises, actions, confrontations etc. In this sense all games are non-linear, as you play them each differently each and every time, and you get a possibly different story from the game every time.

One way of thinking about it would be to have a narrator/speaker sitting beside you as you play and then retell you the session in an exiting way. You could also imagine the story of a game in the conversations between gamers after a lan party. "Did you see the move I did when I ..."

This would implicate that games are actally not a media (carrier of information/stories) in the sense of you getting some story from the developer. Quite the opposite games let you create your own stories.

A game is a language.

The letters are your choises (push button A, move mouse right), the words and sentences are combinations of choises that make some meaning (easy to imagine as a combo in a fighting game), the rules of the game on different levels are the spelling and grammar, paragraphs are your choises to complete some goal, etc.

When thinking about a game as a language this way the traditional story elements of games become quite strange (i.e. mid game cut scene). Imagine the english language as it is, but in the middle of all novels there is a mandatory pre fabricated paragraph!

I don't actually know if these thoughts are meaningful or productive. But it would be interesting to analyse a few games in regards of their "language" capabilities.

We have started to think of a new project after finishing Caribbean Pirate Quest. I have always dreamed of making a turn based strategy game like the old UFO/XCOM games.
We have a simple prototype running and next version should come up on the hUb in two weeks.

Right now i m trying my best to figure things out and trying to limit the scope of the game. You always need to prioritize when you have limited resources. We are thinking of releasing the game as a series of smaller episodes. That way we can delay some elements to later episodes and maybe actually finish the game.

I have started to write the story for the first episodes and it really helps to think of it as series of episodes instead of one big game. You can hint on things to come and you focus on a smaller story.

I saw the movie Predator again the other day (the 'contaaaact' scene is still awesome) and I started thinking about movies and their relation to games.

When looking at the movie I realized that games are seldom as exiting, or at least not exiting in the same way. I think it has something to do with the fact that as a movie viewer you know (most of the time) more than the characters in the movie, at least the big picture. The excitement often comes from you knowing what to do, and then looking at the characters walking around rather clueless. Much time is devoted to showing how cool and awesome the antagonist is and the heroes tries to get a grip of the situation. After that it is basically just for the heroes to solve the situation (by shooting a lot).

This is something you quite seldom see in games. In games you often know quite well what to do and how to do it (it is even regarded as bad game design to leave the players confused). We have big intros and cut scenes in games setting the stage... This is something like just playing the last part of a movie, where the heroes have understood what is going on and are starting to solve the problem.

In this sense games are incredibly flat, even compared to a movie as the Predator.

It would be interesting to try to make a game of the first part of movies. I'm not really sure what this would be like, chances are that you would get so bored/confused that you turn the game off. But I sometimes react against the contemporary more or less super obvious games where you get a reward for just stepping in the right direction.