While I wasn’t able to attend the
workshop on Wednesday due to my job, I was able to read the two readings on the
wiki and this is my response to them.
!Q 1. How can Henry Jenkins's idea of "narrative
architecture" apply to game design even in games that lack a strong,
conventional narrative plot line?
Jenkins talks about how narrative
can be told not just through dialogue or narrative or some grand big story, but
through gameplay and art itself. This is something I’ve always believed in
personally. All parts of the game tell a story in more than one way. Take for
example the game Bioshock. The entire world you travel in is the ruined
underground utopia that carried philosophical beliefs of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.
You get the feeling that this wonderful, grand city was once something amazing,
but now it’s a ruined waste land with insane druggies trying to kill you. The
large scale buildings, the advance technology, the big streets and advertisements
for wonderful powers and abilities, all speak of the underwater city’s rise and
downfall.
Another example would be Fallout,
where you have a desolated wasteland that’s been ruined by war. There are radioactive
areas, a tower that broadcasts news and information, towns with various people
and their own quests. You don’t even need to follow the main story in the game and
spend hours exploring the level. Each new area gives new insight to the world
around you and the people you interact with will give you a sense of their own
backstory and how the towns they live in are like.
Besides art and level design,
gameplay is another key element that can be used to tell narrative. Take the
game Journey, where your goal is to get to the top of the mountain and you have
to rely on help to do so. However, you can’t speak and can only communicate
through sound. The single goal of the game is one big tale of how you and
another face impossible odds to reach the top of a mountain. That itself is a
tale and how you get to the top is the process of how the story unfolds.
Designers can use anything from
level design to music to help relay the game’s world, lore, characters, and
more. Narrative is not limited to just one means of telling, but in all forms.
Q2 : How might I position either my
capstone game concept or one of the concepts to be produced in the spring as
part of a larger transmedia enterprise?
Our game I can see being part of a
transmedia enterprise, but it might be considered a bit controversial in some
aspects. Please keep in mind that as I write this that this is an idea and nothing
more and that the issue being brought up is serious and should not be joked
upon. I am not an expert in psychology nor the understanding of kidnapping and
the damages it can bring up. Again, this is just an idea.
After 9/11, many people went to
various therapies that had them watching the towers fall down or just hear the
sounds of planes in order to help overcome their fears of what happened that
day. It’s been proven to work and similar tests are done, like watching fire
for those scared of fire or hearing gunshot for those who have been near
shootouts. My idea is something similar
What our game, Pale, could do is
be a psychological test to help people who have been kidnapped or stalked by
strangers, and are attempting to face their fears. Being surrounded in a lone
place with only one way out while trying to avoid possible danger is something
that can help people open up to what happen and face the reality of that
feeling. Granted, there doesn’t need to be a person in the game chasing after
them, it could just be sound effects to give the illusion of the presence. The
way the player controls their character in the game could reflect the player/patient’s emotional and physical state
of being. Psychologists can use to see how they are reacting, and help them understand
their patients more.
The game could be changed by
locations, objects, sounds, and more based on each patient’s memories of how
the location of where they were kidnapped. In return, they could be placed in
other areas to see if it’s the location that they fear more, or the thought of
being chased.
Games have been used for psychological
treatments before and in the purpose of what Pale gives is the sense of you,
the player, in an unknown and possibly dangerous location that you must escape
from. It’s a primal fear we all have, but at the same time it can be used to
face this fear and discover how to overcome with or come to terms with a scary
situation.
