Since one of the key factors of my game is it being a story based game, the narrative is vital to the player experience. I am going to come up with a few potential narratives and then build upon one until the concept is something marketable and satisfactory.
generating narrative ideas:
How do i get a player to have an emotional connection to one of these things?
- character player relationships can be a great way to build the investment, empathy towards something humanoid is easier opposed to something not.
- Animals in a very similar manner to this, giving a player something that resembles a living being in real life can make it easier for them to form emotional connections to the Gameworld.
Character connection
there are many ways to push the player to become attached to a certain character within a game, it is this connection that i want to instil within my own narrative. One main way of having an objectively likable character is for them to be relatable. This doesn’t mean their whole personality should relate to everyone, in fact that would probably be impossible. It means that in one way or another in some aspect of this characters life or story it should be something the player has empathy towards, something human, something real. Character relationships are a great tool, it forces the player to build a bond with the character in whatever manner is relevant and therefore be more connected. Everyone to some extent has family, friends or a romantic connection and using that within a Gameworld is a great tool for emotional immersion.
decision
This game concept would focus on taking the player through an emotional journey, heavily narrative based and more of an exploration style game. The player would play as an elderly women in her last moments of life, based around the myth of how before people die their ‘life flashes before their eyes’. The twist is that the player character has dementia and the player is experiencing and playing through parts of her childhood she had forgotten due to the illness. Interacting, solving puzzles and mainly exploring their environment to remember forgotten memories in order to pass on.
How do i plan on having that emotional response?
instead of having the player build a relationship surrounding another character instead they are building a relationship with their own. They are helping aid this little girl through her surroundings and ensuring she discovers lost memories and then experiencing those with her. By spending so much time with the player character the fact that she will inevitably die is a daunting theme and something the player will be reminded of over the course of the game. The emotional response that i am looking for isn’t based around shock factor, something sudden or even the inevitable death; it is the positive and negative memories the player will unlock and experience. it is the nostalgia and empathy they feel towards the player character that should be prevalent throughout the game.
Although the entire prospect of the game is venturing through the past and how nothing you do can help this girl i think it necessary to have two endings for the player to unlock.
One bittersweet ending where the player has helped the girl unlock her memories from her childhood and can passes away with those both positive and negative surrounded by other characters prevalent in the storyline.
One ‘bad’ ending where the girl passes away with little knowledge of her past in a daze of confusion and fear.
Dementia and death can be a very sensitive topic, this is why i believe it necessary to research further into these topics to gain a better understanding myself of how this condition affects somebody. Obviously the game concept is not intended to be perceived as fact or reality but considering my target demographic is young adults and teens they can be highly impressionable and therefore i must have an accurate representation from my characters to an extent.