READING : Games Stories

  The first reading of this week , What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story, was a very good one , it was a nice overview of storytelling , more importantly storytelling in games. Story is crucial for many games to function properly , a good story is sometimes what makes or breaks a game. This article look at story's in many different ways , firstly looking at a problems in the 20th century that movies aren't plays. Surprisingly the first attempts to make movies into stories actually failed so there's that. According to this article it says that the story is conflict, it goes onto explain this in a very way , have a read yourself. The article goes into more detail on how classical stories move, talking about everything from inciting incident to object of desire. It finishes off by saying although yes , it's the writers job to make the story the developers should know at least the basics so the final development game as the best story possible.

The second reading, a academic paper Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the design of Game Narrative is a very long and detailed study of the story in Mass Effect 2, a game i have personally never played so i was abit clueless and lost when reading this paper, it probably would have  been great to have played the game beforehand. Even though i had no knowledge of the game , the overview of the game they gave , gave me a baisc understanding of the story . It was interesting to see the design put in place for a game narrative of a game this size and popular, AAA games tend to have hundreds of people working on them along with huge amounts of money going into it. The most important thing i took away from the paper is the fact that they recognize the "critical role of character design of this game" i personally think the character is the most important part to the game so it was nice reading about there thoughts about character's in this study.

Next up is the YouTube video Telling Stories with Systems , which again just gives a quick overview and some different opinions about stories in games , it was good to see all of teh examples given here and was a nice way to finish off the reading for this week 

Books image from pixabay