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SasqWatch
As the weekend winds down (or the week starts, depending on your timezone), we've got a couple of game design items to take your attention off Gothic 3 patches. PJ's Attic dropped us a line about a white paper they have put together on Games and Storytelling. Here's the accompanying blurb:
Thanks, Corvus!
More information.
Here's a content snip:PJ's Attic has published a white paper titled Games and Storytelling. The white paper describes a storytelling model which our studio developed as a foundation for our game design.
While the model was designed to be inclusive of video games and new media, it also can be used to describe traditional storytelling media such as folkloric oral traditions, music, literature and film.
The model's development was influenced by the writing of Umberto Eco and Marshal McLuhan, improvisational theater techniques, game design principles and over twenty years experience in designing participatory storytelling experiences.
The paper is available as a free download at PJ's Attic.
It's a fairly technical paper in some places and the examples aren't confined to RPGs (Tetris is a prominent example) but worth a read for game students and those that like to delve into serious design contentions.As the order in which events are meant to occur is a part of plot, it can be very difficult to map plot for a game with the depth of Ultima VII. When the audience manages to experience events in an order not foreseen by the storyteller, it can have negative consequences—“breaking” the story and weakening the plot. One method of controlling this is to plan specific
constrained paths through the plot. By limiting choices within the game, you can segment the audience's experience along narrow plot lines.
Knights of the Old Republic could be said to have two primary plot lines—a “Good” path and a “Bad” path—that the player must choose to follow as the narrative progresses. Since the major points in each plot branch must be accessible from multiple previous plot points across other branches, games like this tend to have a limited number of plot branches, resulting in a rather binary plot experience. Players make choices to follow the Good path or the Bad path at different points within the plot. Throughout the game, the number of switches flipped to Good are counted and tallied against the number of switches flipped to Bad, determining which plot point is activated.
Thanks, Corvus!
More information.