Game Narrative | The Game Library

Game Jam: UWW 2016 Hackathon

Bleh, it has been a long road from the start of the Hackathon to typing at my keyboard about the event. This was my first game jam and I was awake a full 24 hours (and beyond), I got sick, and wrecked my sleeping schedule all in order to make a game that only ended up being partially finished. I wouldn’t change a thing. Even with all of its drawbacks, the experience was extraordinary and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Forgive me if this post is a little rambly and all over the place and less professional than some of my other posts. I’m still dealing with the aforementioned sickness and lack of sleep which, surprise! Makes it really hard to think straight.

Anyways, the beginning is probably the best place to start. Our team consisted of 3 programmers/designers, a narrative designer (me), and a visual artist. We trekked together over the hall in which the event was being held and set up all of our computers and various equipment in one of the rooms. We brought a coffee machine which proved to be an excellent morale booster. Anyways, the premise for our game was a series of short and easy to understand mini-games that up to four players could pick up and play. We started with an original goal of making 10 mini games, but ended up scaling back to 5, and then down to 3 games as our deadline grew nearer and we continually ran into various problems or issues that bogged down progress. The programmers tell me that the back-end programming, as well as programming for 4-players, was a real pain.

The game was called Mini Mages and its narrative premise was that of four novice mages applying for an apprenticeship with a renowned grand mage. A lot of the content I had written for the game didn’t make it due to time constraints, but that’s just game development. Things will always have to be cut for the sake of deadlines and or other restrictions. Speaking of restrictions one of the ones I found challenging while writing for the game was my restriction on the length of content. We wanted the game to feel fast-paced and frantic and we wanted to use a typewriter effect that scrolled text in. Combined with the limitation of having the screen with text appear for a limited amount of time to keep with the quick pace of the game all of my written content had to be around 100 – 120 characters. Not words, characters! My skills to write with brevity were pushed to limits. (Unlike now where I’m just spewing info at you.) It was hard, but it got done eventually. After that, I spent the rest of the night supporting the real heroes (our programmers and visual artist) by looking for free audio we could use, due to a lack of time to create our own, and by making sure everyone was stocked with snacks, coffee, and energy drinks.

Anyways, long story short it was a lot of fun. We made 3 mini games for our game and we got 3rd place out of the other competitors. All in all, not a bad day/night.

I’d highly encourage you to look for game jams in your area and or create your own. They’re great fun especially when you’re surrounded with your friends and working on something that you are all greatly passionate about.

Now I am going to resume sleeping in hopes that eventually I’ll wake up without a headache or feeling sick in general.

P.S. Still worth it

By the way here is the video of our presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHdUVcHGy7g

Case Study: Fallout 4 A Clash of Narrative & Design

written by Ian Hertzberg

First off, before people accuse me of bashing Fallout 4 I ‘d just like to say that I love the game and I am one of the biggest Bethesda Softworks fanboys that I know, but just because you love something doesn’t mean you can’t be critical of it. (Sidenote: Do not apply to friends and family)

Fallout 4’s narrative starts off with your character’s life and family being shattered by total atomic annihilation. Your hometown is destroyed, most of the world population dies, your spouse gets murdered, and your son gets kidnapped while you are forced to watch helplessly from the sidelines. It is a pretty hard-hitting and emotional opening. As your character ascends into the world from Vault 111 there is a definite sense of dread and loss as you look upon your neighborhood, Sanctuary Hills, and the rest of the commonwealth of Massachusetts in complete and utter ruin. The game guides you through a couple tutorial-esque missions before giving you direction to head to a place called Diamond City to search for your lost son, and then . . . Fallout 4 derails its own narrative.

Fallout 4’s world is huge and expansive with plenty to do, such as side quests, exploring unique locations, looting, crafting, joining a faction, and creating and helping various settlements in the wasteland. For me and a few other people who’ve played the game this all ended up taking precedences over finding your missing son. Your missing 1-year-old son lost in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland filled with, raiders, cannibals, mutants, ghouls, and a million other horrors. You’re telling me that a parent that awakens 200 years after the world is nuked to hell would rather be saving total strangers, building settlements, or taking a scenic tour of Walden Pond? I think not!

If it was my actual child I would have torn ass to Diamond City first chance I got and Fallout 4 gives you the means to do just that. Within the first hour or so of gameplay they hand you Power Armor and a minigun. More than enough protection for you to make it to Diamond City in one piece but, instead most players, myself included, seem to find themselves wandering around exploring the huge and expansive world Bethesda has created. Which is great! Bethesda’s believable world building and design are some of the things that make their games truly unique and special, it is what makes Bethesda such a popular and beloved game development studio, but the same thing that makes them great hurts the genuinely great narrative created for the game.

Player's also spent time using the new settlement mod to create things like this. — Player’s also spent time using the new settlement mode creating things like this.

Every bit of Fallout 4’s gameplay and design urges most players to go and explore and do whatever they will in its open world, but it creates a disconnect with the motives of the protagonist Bethesda created. However you play your character, whether you help the people of the wastes or pillage and steal, there is no getting around the fact that your character was written with the desire to find their son and track down their spouse’s killer. Your character will unavoidably say so at multiple points. This takes away the freedom players had in previous Bethesda titles where their character was more or less a blank slate that could be whoever they wanted. In Fallout 4 you can act as you want, but your character’s initial goal is finding their son, no matter what choices you make. You are forced to play as a character that constantly reminds people of their desire to find their son, but instead does a million other things such as helping or robbing total strangers, building settlements, or salvaging crafting materials, because that’s what the player naturally wants to do. The person behind the controller isn’t going to care nearly as much about the virtual baby that only got a few minutes of screen time before being stolen, but the character definitely should and that emotion should transfer to the player, it should invest them in their troubles, that’s when stories are at their best and where video games have great potential for emotional storytelling.

This conflict could be resolved in a few ways, either you make the player want what the character wants, which would involve making the player far more emotionally invested in their family from before the war. If players could have spent more time with their character’s spouse and child before the bombs dropped they would might care about them and have a stronger sense of urgency to match that of their character.

The default player characters at the character creation screen.

Another method is designing the game in a way that what the player wants to do becomes essential to accomplishing the main character’s goal. For example if Power Armor and other great equipment wasn’t handed out at the beginning of the game you’d be forced to explore and scavenge to prepare for your journey to Diamond City or if there was a series of challenges that were essential to reaching Diamond City other than just reaching the city itself that would have made the game’s narrative much stronger because players would have done what they wanted to do as part of the mainstory. The impulses of the player would have been incorperated more clearly into the plot.

Lastly, you could remove the urgency from the story, which would probably ruin the current story or involve the creation of a completely different story, but it would solve the problem. If you knew for sure that your son was safe for the time being or if Fallout 4 narrative went in a different direction that didn’t involve the whole missing child angle. There would be no disconnect you’d be free to establish your character’s own agency and desires

Now, I’m not saying that this ruined Fallout 4, the game is still fantastic, and in my opinion an all around great game that deserves all the critical praise it has receiving, but I believe that with a few tweaks Fallout 4’s narrative could have been so much more emotionally rich and engaging to players with a more cohesive meld of the games narrative and its design.

So, what do you think? Am I being way too nit-picky? Do you find issue with Fallout 4’s story like me? Are they the same issues or different ones? Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Hmm . . . Now, that I think of it Fallout 3, in a way, did all of the things I talked about in this article. They made the player care about the character’s objective, they made what the player wanted essential to completing the character’s goal, and they didn’t create a story that forced urgency on the character, but that . . . is an article for another day. Thanks for reading!

Game Blurb: The Other Kind of Experience

Written by Ian Hertzberg

Game Blurb is another column about smaller talking points regarding games and design. Basically, they’re just me trying to collect and publish some loose thoughts rattling around in my brain. This one, in particular, can be translated into a lot of mediums other than game design, but I’ll be strictly talking about it in those terms for the sake of staying on topic.

Our topic for today is experience and no I’m not talking about points used to level up a character in a Role-Playing Game or an MMO, but instead about life experiences in general and how they have inspired games and their design. It’s actually pretty amazing how much of the games creators goes into the games they produce.

One of the earliest examples of life experience being translated to a game that I can think of is Shigeru Miyamoto’s inspiration for the original Legend of Zelda game which was inspired by his exploration of the hills, caves, and woodlands surrounding his hometown. Translating these experiences into a game is what drove Miyamoto’s design and the games early concept. Link, like young Shigeru Miyamoto, would wander and explore various areas. One of the most important elements of this exploration Miyamoto wanted to convey was a sense of discovery, hence all of the secrets that players can stumble across while exploring the game’s world.

Quantic Dream CEO, writer, and director, David Cage created Beyond: Two Souls based on his experiences with the loss of a loved one. He took a highly personal and heartbreaking experience and turned it into a touching and thrilling experience in which protagonist, Jodi Holmes, explores feelings related to death and loss throughout her story within the game.

“But the more I wrote, the more I realised I was writing about what I had experienced. Writing is a strange process, because you don’t always know what you have to say when you start. It’s only when you read yourself that you realise ‘okay, this is what my inner voice had to say” – David Cage

Lastly, we have Uncharted 4, which I recently wrote about in a previous article. In a Game Informer interview with Uncharted 4 game director Bruce Straley and creative director Neil Druckmann. The two talk about the development of both Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the previous game they developed The Last of Us , but in the interview, they also touch on the relatability of the characters and what has inspired some of their narrative choices. Neil Druckmann talked about how his passion for making games mirrors the main character, Drake’s, passion for adventure. Both of them struggle with sacrifices in the pursuit of their passions, specifically a sacrifice of family. Neil mentioned that he hasn’t been able to spend as much time with his family as he’d always like because he is working on games. So then the game’s narrative ended up exploring obsession and passion. Can it go too far? What would you sacrifice? What should you sacrifice?

Pulling from experiences such as those above adds greatly to the narrative and design of any game. They add a level of relatability and honesty that only comes from conveying a true experience. If you’re thinking, “We’ll I want to make a game about a secret agent or a samurai, but I don’t know anything about that experience.” Then I would advise you to find the relatable experience from what you do know about the game or narrative you’re creating. Maybe you know or are someone who leads a double life of sorts. You could convey that experience in the creation of your secret agent game. Or maybe you have a strong sense of integrity and honor or live by a code of some sort, you could relate that to your samurai game.

What I guess I’m trying to say is that you can inject personal experience into games in a lot of ways by drawing from not only events but feelings as well and then translate them into your games creating an honest and relatable story. Easier said than done, but I think that’s part of the trick, part of the magic of narrative, especially in games which are, in a way, synthetic experiences.

Hope you gained something from the article, I know I did.

If you liked what you just read feel free to come back for more. I have new content towards the end of every week. Also feel free to leave your thoughts opinions in the comment section bellow.

Until next time,

– Ian