Champlain Blog post 13

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.