Reading About Game Stories
In this reading session we'll be talking about if games can be artistic and can we make a game be fun from a mechanical standpoint as well as from a narrative and story point of view.
In this article we talk about what art is and how that art is portrayed. It speaks about six layers of art:
Idea/Purpose
Form
Idiom or genre
Structure
Craft
Surface
These are taken in the literal sense of each word; meaning that each layer describes its 'piece' of art and how its represented in our physical world. These can also be taken in any order you wish but they all link together to make something. A comic for example; its given form, then you see the surface of it, being the art and lines, and then looking deeper for the story and how its crafted to make it compelling and this leads to a genre and this will head towards a message being portrayed in the comic itself. This can be linked to games as well in near enough the same order. This post made me think that; even though we're mainly dealing with how to make the game work in a mechanical way we're also supposed to look at it in an artistic way that will give in a sense of purpose behind our work.
The second piece of work I looked at was about how we're to learn from the 'Hero's Journey' as story tellers and game writers. I feel that this is a good point in that we can go about doing things a certain and generic way in both terms of story, were the plot is very predictable, and from a game writing point of view where we telegraph how the game will progress (A.K.A Hand holding). Instead we should mash it up and change the so-called 'rules' of the design. Here we could, for example; Instead of starting from the bottom of the food chain, in story arc and character design, to being at the pinnacle and trying to hold onto the position.
This third article speaks about somethings that us developers should know. First and foremost being about story. A good quote from this is 'games aren't movies'. This is very interesting in that we don't have to follow the traditional way of giving a narrative and maybe stepping even further away from it.
In this article we talk about what art is and how that art is portrayed. It speaks about six layers of art:
Idea/Purpose
Form
Idiom or genre
Structure
Craft
Surface
 |
| Story Telling Outside your heaven Link Here |
These are taken in the literal sense of each word; meaning that each layer describes its 'piece' of art and how its represented in our physical world. These can also be taken in any order you wish but they all link together to make something. A comic for example; its given form, then you see the surface of it, being the art and lines, and then looking deeper for the story and how its crafted to make it compelling and this leads to a genre and this will head towards a message being portrayed in the comic itself. This can be linked to games as well in near enough the same order. This post made me think that; even though we're mainly dealing with how to make the game work in a mechanical way we're also supposed to look at it in an artistic way that will give in a sense of purpose behind our work.
The second piece of work I looked at was about how we're to learn from the 'Hero's Journey' as story tellers and game writers. I feel that this is a good point in that we can go about doing things a certain and generic way in both terms of story, were the plot is very predictable, and from a game writing point of view where we telegraph how the game will progress (A.K.A Hand holding). Instead we should mash it up and change the so-called 'rules' of the design. Here we could, for example; Instead of starting from the bottom of the food chain, in story arc and character design, to being at the pinnacle and trying to hold onto the position.
This third article speaks about somethings that us developers should know. First and foremost being about story. A good quote from this is 'games aren't movies'. This is very interesting in that we don't have to follow the traditional way of giving a narrative and maybe stepping even further away from it.
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