I swiped this directly off of macgamer.com-- http://www.macgamer.com/news/item.php?id=6613
"New Fictional Forms Through Games-- Wednesday, March 19, 2003 - 11:45
am
While stereotyped as violent and mindless, the artificial intelligence
and behavioral programming in modern games has begun to reveal new
forms of emergent narrative, or so writes Julian Stallabrass in
"Computer Fictions," published in the UK's Prospect Magazine.
Stallabrass starts off by discussing the 8-bit classic space
exploration game Starflight. From there, he moves into more modern
ground, and covers Deus Ex, shooters, role-playing games, and arcade
games, and how their increasing complexity and capacity for simulation
is causing new and unexpected narratives to emerge from deceptively
shallow-looking game worlds. He is fully aware of current limitations,
though, as revealed in this discussion of Deus Ex:
Computer games now present players with increasingly rich environments
offering complex interaction. Yet narrative remains limited. While a
child with dolls or soldiers can spin tales of great length and
flexibility, the stories in games remain simple and linear. The more
choices granted to a player, the more storylines proliferate, and each
needs to be scripted by someone. One solution is to make the narrative
branches cross; so in the cyberpunk RPG, 'Deus Ex', the choices made by
the player shuffle the order of the games' episodes. (This game offered
the player three different endings, all morally troublesome, based on
the premise of the player as a government agent fighting "terrorists"
who turn out to be at least no worse than his employers.) Such a tactic
reduces the number of narrative branches, but at the cost of not being
able to build into the story any memory of the order in which things
take place-thus, many of 'Deus Ex's' episodes act as independent
missions, rather than chapters in a story. In novels, the reader is
carried from one episode to the next without any options other than to
stop reading, yet the number and complexity of connections between
episodes is almost unlimited. In computer games, as a direct result of
offering choice to the player, the more open the narrative, the more
amnesiac the game.
For the rest of the discussion of what is emerging as games become
more complex, take a look at Prospect Magazine's "Computer Fictions,"
by Julian Stallabrass. "
(That's the March issue of Prospect, no longer available for free online.)
It _is_ a challenge to write a scenario arc that doesn't end in the
same place regardless of the path you take--aside from the differing
endings of ultimate victory or failure.
Even the biggest variation of a planned arc I've run has had only
limited effect on the campaign as it continued. (I fully expected the
heroes to fail a very difficult quest and be stranded far from home.
They nevertheless succeeded and as a result skipped the entire River of
Cradles scenario arc.)
Can anyone think of a campaign arc that DOESN'T end in the same place
regardless of how the characters acted? Sure, the HEROES may be in a
different place (married Jezra/buried Jezra, fought off the watchdog at
the cradle/killed by dragonewts, freed Kallyr from the ice/dead on the
ground)
but is there something out there where the published campaign can end
in completely different narrative places?
Mike
http://differentgames.onestop.net/
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