[guest253]

good stuff! *hugs thread*

i don't believe in games as a narrative medium anymore!

i think the main problem is the age-old enmity between narrative and immersion (immersion as in "being a part of the story", i mean). usually the main character's emotional state is relevant to the narrative. in games we need to choose between a 1st or 3rd person perspective to convey the main character's mental state, and narrative and immersion dictate different choices here. if the narrative for example requires the main character to be sad, we can implement this in 2 ways, both of which suck:

1st person: avatar = player.
stategy: assume.
we try to make player sad, assume that he's sad, and continue our story as if he's sad.
problem: since we don't have any access to the player's actual emotional respons, we're fishing in a black hole, and our assumptions will often be way off (what Kipple said) -> exit narrative quality.

3rd person: avatar =/= player.
stategy: impose.
we rip control of the avatar out of the player's hands and have the avatar explicitly show his sadness.
problem: having your avatar switch in and out of NPC mode totally breaks immersion.

that's a rock and a hard place right there.
either we preserve immersion but lose narrative quality, or we preserve narrative quality but lose immersion.

workaround:
don't assume, don't impose.

if we can't assume or impose an emotional state, we'll have to leave it out of the equation altogether. that's rather awkward in any game with a significant amount of social interaction, and only works in an environment that isn't expected to respond to the avatar's emotional state. i.e. lonely game. SotC's narrative qualities are not the result of a solution but of a workaround. works fine, great game, but i don't think it really brought us closer to solving the problem. i don't think the problem can be solved with our means of interfacing.

[wild fantasy]
it could however work if the player could impose his emotions on the avatar, instead of vice versa. and i don't mean princess peach. maybe once we have the kind of interface to communicate emotion-related data to games, we could give it another try. something like a lie detector, measuring stuff like heart-beat, blood-pressure, shakyness of player's hands, pupil size, whatever. have the game respond to the player's emotions, instead of hoping for the player's emotions to respond to the game.

probably some way off, though i guess a wiimote could notice shaky hands. could be pretty good fun though. supposedly a big part of our emotional experience is a matter of interpretation, and we may interpret the same physical state as different emotional states depending on context. the medium would allow for some all sorts of wicked context-juggling to fuck with people's interpretations of their own physical state. we could have some seriously bizarre mind-rape-games. i would totally be up for this. ^_^
[/wild fantasy]

but yeah i think that until that time narrative games are doomed to be either lonely or wonky. i don't mind, i'd just wish that more developers would choose lonely over wonky. or go back to making videogamey videogames. cinema didn't get big by mimicking theatre or literature. i don't think we'll ever stop hearing the line "the movie is nice but the book is better". as long as we don't drastically change in interface games aren't gonna beat movies or books in terms of narrative quality.

i see a lot more in games that take making music instead of "going on an adventure" as inspiration. games that flow naturally instead of tripping over their own interactivity. interactivity should be the strength of the medium, not it's weakness. so look for systems that are fun to manipulate and build games around those, instead of thinking up a big story and then tacking on some interactivity later on.

speaking of systems, i think game-developers are still mostly thinking in real-world concepts which puts all sorts of useless limits on the kind of systems they can come up with. for example, if you view shmups as games about planes shooting other planes and bombing tanks then you won't come up with anything new. if you take a step back and view them as games about hitboxes and colored blobs, then you can think up bizarre systems like those of Espgaluda and Every Extend. i think we're only just scratching the surface of what amazing stuff we can still come up with if we learn to let go of that real-world grounding. kind of like when people just started using synthesizers to create sounds that didn't sound like any existing instrument. videogamey videogames ftw imho. ^_^

hey speaking of narrative, where IS Guardian?

[guest253]

@ Toups:
i should look into the semantics of the word "narrative" a bit more, my idea of what it means is pretty cloudy...
i guess i used it in a narrow sense, as "the conveying of a story" rather than "a sequence of events".
cause people i still totally believe in games as sequences of events ok. ^_^
also Toups how's the barfing?
you ok?