So, continuing from my last post, in the premises that we are trying to make more meaningful experience out of our interactive media by delivering certain messages out of our work and there are certain type of messages that are best communicated through linear media and then there are others. When you have chosen interactive media then you’ve got to know what’s the tools ready for you to use. I think most of all just the fact that giving the space to participate to audience itself is already a win and major attraction. That’s good but not enough. In fact it could be more interactive in the experience of so called ‘linear media’. For example, many good movies always make people think what’s going to happen in their own way. The quality of interaction like this is actually a lot more sophisticated then that of a not well crafted so called ‘interaction’ in an interactive media. The reason why puzzle games are often one of the most well crafted games is that ‘puzzle’ gives perfect excuses of constantly moving/jumping/exploring the game world. Controlling your protagonist in game is mostly very low level interaction when it’s just for sake of controlling. Sometimes puzzle gives pretty good reason to keep shooting, avoiding obstacles, jumping around and so on to solve . Since puzzle is still part of the gameplay mechanics( close to the nature of interactivity ) it’s more likely considered better drive for player interaction compared to that of linear narrative. Apparently game designers are eager to find ways to deliver narrative perfectly fused with the core mechanics of gameplay. Recent articles from gamasutra also deal with these and we definitely have so much unexplorered free space for narrative in games. Also music games have pretty good match in their game mechanics with the interaction. Button matching makes perfect sense in music game since it’s how we actually interact with original instruments. Musical performance through musical instruments is one of the most naturally interactive experience that we don’t really have to ask why. Music games are really successful and often easily delivers high quality of interaction because of that. Then we have this big assignment that how to bring the natural linearity of the story telling into interactive media? Most of the obvious attempts in this are focusing on the illusion of it. What I mean is that trying to make audience feel like they are controlling the narrative. Sometimes it is quite enough to just create the ‘feel’ of participation in the narrative. It is in the same idea of that the more important thing is the ‘process’ of the story not the ‘result’ of story. In this kind of ideas, stories have number of waypoints that have finite result but try to make players get through certain interaction to reach there. And then there are more downright approach to actually manipulating the narrative by audience’s choice. Games with multi-ending or different character development affecting story itself would be in this category. Fable would be a good example of this. Then there are games like sims that don’t have any explicit story verbally written but the story itself comes from the somewhat symbolized interaction between characters. It’s kind of a procedurally generated story when you play the games along. Then there are meta games that has all the interaction on top of a not-so-much narrative games from the interactions in people of the community talking about the their game experience…
// TODO: More thoughts… later. 
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on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Game Design.
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