Game Stories

For this week's reading, I decided to just focus on this article here. Written by John Sutherland for Game Developer, it's about the story in game design and why it is an important part of the "collaborative effort" of creating a good video game. He goes lists a lot of good points, all of which I agree with and found very interesting, such as "story is conflict", which he mentions multiple times, and says in the article that if you remember nothing else from this article, remember that story is conflict. This rings true for any examples of games, tv shows, or movies that I can think of that have a good story. 

Playing Fortnite via Pixabay

John then goes on to list Halo as an example of the classic three-act structure, even with a very basic plot and story, Halo still follows the rules of the three-act structure, and does it well enough for a game that is about shooting aliens. The article then goes over one of the most important parts of storytelling in video games, do, then show, then tell, as opposed to the movie version which is show don't tell, the video game version prefers the player to experience it first, before being shown it but don't use dialog to tell the player.

Another interesting article from this week was a case study on Mass Effect, linked here, but it is an academic paper so be warned.