“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal
Depending on the type of game you’re making, Narratives can be integral to a game’s overall plot. Humans have used stories throughout our entire lives to inform, control but also entertain. Stories, stories, stories… where would my game be without one…
After establishing the Character Designs last week, we focused on Narratives. While not necessarily required, narratives are heavily important to games. With my Game idea, a good narrative will be especially important for player engagement. A well-established Narrative helps:
- Establish the player’s Role
- Immerse the player into your intended experience
- Help explore complex themes that you want to tackle within your game
On Monday, we generated a narrative using the Adam and Eve sample text we also used in Year 1. I think it’s a useful tool to be able to rearrange a narrative and make new stories as we go along. The arrangement my team and I ended up with was understandable yet somewhat nonsensical.
The next task we did was making our own story based on an existing one. My team and I chose ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. We rearranged different aspects of the classic tale to create something slightly different than the original. Rather than the bears catching Goldilocks and her running away from the scene, it’s rather she runs away because she knows that she shouldn’t be touching anything in the house. So… not that different but I thought the overall rearrangement was a fun task to do.
Halloween Murder Mystery Guest Lecture
On Thursday, we did a workshop with a really cool person (Amber Boothe), an Escape Room maker from Nobody’s Fool Mystery Games. It was a very fitting lesson for Halloween as a few of us were all dressed up, and scattered around the classroom. Escape Rooms are inherently games but not vice versa, so getting a talk from someone who specialises in this was very interesting as they give a different perspective to a shared subject (Games).
I wrote a few notes on the elements of an engaging Murder Mystery Game: Clues, Suspense, and finally Climax. I think elements of this dotted in a non-murder mystery game would elevate a plot. With my game, I think Suspense would be the most useful plot device, as the player cannot be seen by enemies (humans, cats, foxes). Introducing suspense would make the player anticipate something bad happening if they do something which might cause an enemy to see them.
I thought it was interesting to see how games and storytelling intersect in this regard. We went through one of the plotlines that the company hosts. One detail that I thought was fascinating was that in this iteration of Murder Mystery games, no one knows what roles they are. If they somehow find out that they might be the murderer, they must keep that information hidden and instead act like an innocent. Everyone has “Secret Information” that they aren’t allowed to talk about until they are directly asked about it.
I think this addition to the games makes it more exciting, as people don’t know what they’re going into. In a typical murder mystery game, people will be given their roles and act accordingly e.g you are the murderer so you act innocent yet cunning and deceitful.
A few useful tips from this session would be:
- Keep the story simple
- Red Herrings are annoying
- People want murder, not tragedy
I think these tips could easily apply to a murder mystery videogame or board game. It isn’t as relevant to my game as I’m not making a murder mystery-type game, but still a useful talk.
Thanks for reading this week’s summary!