The Never-Ending Story… of Stories in Games
For those of you who are studying ARGs this semester, some the former members of ‘Mind Candy’, the creators of Perplexcity, have founded a new company called ‘Six to Start’ and their first project is called We Tell Stories. Made in collaboration with Penguin Books, the project is a series of stories written by professional authors exploring digital fiction. However, I have heard a rumor that there is an ARG hidden somewhere in the website, so happy hunting:
On a related note, Adrian Hon (one of the founders of Six to Start) recently gave a talk about stories in games at a Barcamp in Brighton, England. You can get a summation of the lecture at the Guardian Unlimited’s games blog here and Mr. Hon has posted his slides on his own blog here.
Umm…Legend of Zelda as an example of “Branching Narrative”?
Which Zelda did Aleks play exactly?
Sorry for the double post. And sorry if this sounds like a harsh rant. But dammit I must express my disappointment. I just read a lot of 21 steps. I don’t get it. What exactly did they think they were achieving by having us follow a blue line around a map in between paragraphs of the story? A story is not the map it takes place in, and even less so when you are not navigating that map yourself (like in a game). I totally appreciate the notion of experimenting with new story formats, and I love the idea of putting experienced writers in the world of digital storytelling. But a digital story, like digital music or film, must achieve something that could not otherwise be done in traditional non-digital forms. The Google-Maps idea screams, “because we can,” and is not driven by the narrative at all. In fact, in one of those blog posts, they talk about how the writer had a dialog-heavy scene take place in a room, and the “producers” tried to make it move more, so the blue line could move around the map more.
I liken this to digital music. When digital music starting coming on to the scene way back when, the music became about NEW experiences that could only be had in digital form, such as new timbres – because now they were able to synthesize new sounds that no one had heard before. You couldn’t do new things with harmony, for example. So out came the synths and pads and sounds of outter-space. Likewise, guys like Aphex Twin busted out rythms that could only be created with computers.
When a new WAY of doing something emerges, I think the new content created in that way must reflect the unique properties of the emerging process. Following a story around a Google Map is nothing new (How about those classic scenes in movies where we follow the line around a map? Even Lord of the Rings fans can trace the journey from the Shire to Mordor). What we are left with is a standard story (it’s not my place to criticize the writing itself here), with a completely forced, tacked on “feature” that makes it digital.
Nice rant.