Gaming Narrative

Being a computer animation student and soon to be professional, I love story telling. It's part of what I do. But my medium isn't at all the same as the art medium of video games.
Now, I love video games. I've been playing video games since I could hold a controller and story always seemed second to gameplay. If it was fun, I'd play it (I'm looking at you Mario). That being said, I think story is very important to a gaming experience. Something to pull me into a world and keep me there. 
The Legend of Zelda series is one of, if not, my favorite video game franchises of all time. The gameplay is consistently fun and well designed, but the story holds a lot together. But here's the tricky part with story or narrative as it relates to video games. 

Mmm... Still gets me.

The Zelda series has claimed to become more and more story oriented, but really it's just gotten longer cutscenes and more dynamic animations. Even the first game for the Nintendo Entertainment system released in 1986. had narrative that was built into it's mechanics. The first thing that happens in the game as soon as you press start is you're thrown in a giant world with three directions to go and a cave. The narrative here is the exploration. You are just as lost and ready to discover new things as Link is.

This is something that AAA games seem to be doing less of and that's telling a narrative or giving an experience through play. Not that I'm against fancy cutscenes or extended dialogue, but I was kind of turned off by the beginning of Skyrim. No matter how friggen' excited all my friends were to play this game, this beginning is still boring.

The most exciting part is at the very tail end of this video. Really? This game includes basically everything plus killing dragons by yelling at them. Yet, the first 8 minutes has you strapped in a cart listening to Random Rob and Somebody Sam talk about... stuff and all you can do is turn your head. This shouldn't be how narrative is presented.

I recently found a youtube channel called Extra Credits. The writer has worked on everything from AAA video game titles to smaller titles like Farmville and even started his own MMO. These guys know what they're talking about and they describe game narrative too perfectly for me to word any different, so I'll just post they're video about it.

Long story short, even a simple game like Missile Command can have a strong narrative that can explore deep human emotion with out a single cutscene. It forces the player to feel and experience the narrative on his or her own. And again, I am definitely not against cutscenes. I know Megan Boyd touched on Luigi's Mansion, but I just recently beat the new 3DS sequel (I'm ahead) and I will say I got a lot of narrative from the little actions Luigi does. They add to his character and add to the experience the player is supposed to be having. Of course, the magical thing about Luigi's Mansion 2 is that these acting beats follow into the gameplay as well. 

I guess really my point is that game narrative is best told through gameplay.

Screenplay - Ghost World

For this assignment, I was under the impression that we weren't supposed to be familiar with the screenplay we were reading, so I picked Ghost World. I've never seen it before and based on it's title, I could only assume it was about ghosts. Sounds fun.
...
Nope, it's a teenage comedy-drama film. 
Let's do some director's notes on it.

-The script is obviously going for that dry/dramatic humor that films like Juno are trying to achieve. Most of the shots should be relatively flat staging and the longer we can hold a frame, the better.

-We really need the audience to get into the heads of these two girls, so the three girls speaking at the graduation need to be especially annoying. They need to sound like they only care about themselves.

-I'm also thinking this should be a cooler climate. Somewhere up north. I don't want them to be freezing, but I want the sense that it's dull/grey outside.

-One big note for our two leading ladies is they need to be angst-y without sounding annoying. These are our protagonists. We don't want the audience disregarding them before the film gets started. For example, ENID needs to be a nerdy girl who doesn't really fit in with the crowd. She shouldn't be mad, just tired of always getting the short stick.

(more notes to come...)

Howl

Reading and listening to this poem are two very different experiences, but they shared a common theme. They both had a continuous flow within them that strung me along through words and ideas at an invigorating pace. The big difference is that when I read it, I can stop and try to figure out what the hell I'm looking at. But, after hearing it read aloud, I only became lost in a whirlwind of powerful and thought provoking words. This poem definitely knows how to get your mind racing.

The Lies of Lolita

The Lies of Lolita

Lolita was very interesting to me. It was interesting not only because I was reading about a pedophile explaining his internal and eventually external desires, but it was the way it was presented. At one point, early in the novel, the main character says, ”Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.” In one sentence, the reader is informed that a lot of what we’re about to be told is a straight up lie. I couldn’t help but feel like almost everything I was reading was a twist of reality. This is in itself interesting considering this is a fictional novel.

                I’m always interested in the ways people tell stories about factual events. It’s something we all do. I do it even when I’m unaware of it. We twist the stories to either make them more entertaining, more exciting, or in some cases to help explain our point of view. Lolita feels like a story being told by someone you’re interviewing in jail. Not surprisingly, that’s exactly what’s happening. It is someone trying to tell you a story about the wrongs they’ve done, but make you sympathize with them at the same time. It made me question how much of it was true or how much of it did he want to be true. It made me re-evaluate scenes and consider if this was a mask of the truth. There is a scene in particular where Lolita is almost begging him for intimacy, but in other scenes we realize that that is completely out of character for her. It reminds you that in some of these scenes, our protagonist, Humbert, is either lying or detailing a fiction that he invented to justify his thoughts and his eventual actions.

                For some people, this story can seem offensive or appalling, but since this particular novel is considered one of the best novels ever written, it proves that there’s some attraction to it. I think we’re attracted to the idea of a well-spoken person trying to rationalize their insanity or faults with us. It’s the same reason why a television show like Dexter can do so well. The main character is a serial killer. He brutally murders someone at least once every two episodes. But, we can’t help but root for him. He describes it as a need. We see it through his mind and it isn’t until we see it through someone else’s mind that we remember that he’s a maniac. We get lost in the humanity of it. When Humbert explains events to us, I feel like I’m falling for it right up until I remember that he’s sexualizing little girls.