ShortThought: Narrative, Story, Games
Update: Excitingly there have been other posts and contributions - a follow up will come soon. But in the meantime, please read these posts too!
Posts from: Mary Hamilton and Mark Sorrell from our conversation on Twitter - referenced here by Paul Bradshaw.
You could talk a lot about stories and games and how they interact or don't. And why story telling in games is rubbish. Or great. At a recent event in MediaCity, for the BBC initiative Digital Fiction Factory, the author, Melvin Burgess stood up to talk about stories. He gave his thoughts on how to write for games (or interactive media) versus for books. He basically said that in games there is really only the discovery of narrative and as such you could only really rely on history to give context to situations the player found themselves in. I found that interesting.It sort of sparked something in my mind that finally clicked some pieces together. I guess I formed an opinion. Stories don't exist. What do I mean by that? Let me try to explain where I'm at with this. And by all means chime in, because I've never done any thinking on my own - I rely on other minds and their experience and insight in order to learn. And that's part of it. A story as an entity, as a thing doesn't exist until some event, some imagination, some narrative is constructed, relived, shared or described. It must be told. It is "story telling", after all. Only at the point that you tell someone about that something does it become real, does it become a story. It is always from your perspective, it is always your interpretation, it is a gift you wish to share and that is how it comes to be.In a game you can plant narrative as discoverable, you can have cut scenes, you can have environments and situations and mechanics and toys and rules and delight and wonderful play - and in all of this you hide traditional "stories" from visual and textual creators (until read or viewed they don't exist) and you have the emergence of events that may indeed become stories when you share with another person.I argue that games are a phenomenal story telling excuse, because of the multitude of parts they present that allow narrative discovery or the experience of unpredictable events, because when you are with another person (maybe even in the game!) and you chose to share your experience you will create a story and you and your companion will have given birth to something precious.What do you think?
