Month: January 2016

2 Ideas for Narratives

My 2 Ideas are

  • Train Traveler Simulator
  • Random Day Generator

 

For the train simulator, the concept behind it is to tell a story of the everyday commuter traveling to and fro from his home to workplace or whatever his destination is. The goal is to simulate the problems faced by the commuter and how one would overcome it by taking different train routes or other options.

Problems faced may include

  1. faulty train lines
  2. certain stations being unavailable
  3. delayed trains

Game play:

Print

The player would start his or her journey at a random station with a goal of getting to another random destination. At the start of the game there might be some lines or stations that are unavailable. Over the course of the journey more problems may occur and the player has to make decisions and alter his or her course of action.

 

Have you ever woken up one day with absolutely no idea what to do?

Then the Random Day Generator is just what you need!

Print

Random Day Generator is basically a database of POV videos tagged and organised into categories such as

  1. Morning
  2. Breakfast
  3. Afternoon
  4. Lunch
  5. Night
  6. Dinner

The idea is to tell a story of a random day using videos that are cut to fit the categories and mixed and matched to sort of procedural generate a day.

This would be done in HTML and Javascript. To create a platform where other users can upload and categorize their own experiences.

Users would basically come to the website click on the options that the want for instance sports or road trip and such and have a random day based on that generated for them.

Print

That was my 2 ideas more updates soon!

 

Thoughts on Eric Zimmerman’s Four Concepts

Eric Zimmerman’s Four Concepts have made me rethink a couple of things related to games.

Four Concepts- Eric Zimmerman

  • The role of games in relation to narratives and storytelling
  • Interactivity and it’s many forms

With regards to the role of games in relation to narratives, from what I gather from the essay every game has a story even a simple game of pong. So ultimately the question of whether a game has a story or not is completely irrelevant. What is relevant however is how the story is told in the AAA games of today we see a very cinematic way of storytelling, in the words of Zimmerman himself these games suffer from “Cinema envy”. It is evident that we are not utilizing games to it’s full potential in terms of narrative and storytelling. But in recent times simulation games have shown us a new path where the story is made in real time where there is no written script. The challenge comes in creating a compelling story where players want to see how this never ending story unfolds. That is not to say that the games of today are bad in their method of story telling. What I am trying to get at is that the games of today draw inspiration from existing mediums of storytelling and that in a way prevents games from reaching it’s full potential in creating a new method of storytelling.

How Eric Zimmerman explains Interactivity is extremely helpful in understanding the different modes of human interaction. For a game to be successful it has to fulfill all requirements.

  1. Cognitive interactivity – where the player finds new insights after experiencing certain content.
  2.  Functional interactivity – the platform in which the game is played, do the controls suit the game
  3. Explicit interactivity – How to choices of the player affect the game
  4. Meta-interactivity – How cultural participation plays a part in the game, does it spawn an entire fan base of people creating new content for the game, does it have online multiplayer where players can form communities. That sort of thing

All these play important roles in creating games.

 

Execute

Having a great idea is good and all but it will never amount to anything if all you do is think about it.

Execution is the word of the day in this aspect, planning is important but if all you do is make plans you will have nothing at the end of the day. having the drive to do something is not simply built into you, it has to be cultivated set deadlines for yourself and make sure you stick to them.

Participate in a competition to give yourself motivation. maxresdefault

JUST DO IT!!

Narrativity

What makes a work a narrative? What are the conditions for a narrative? Narratives according to Eric Zimmerman all have these in common an initial state, a change in state and an insight from that change. It is not simply a series of event but a personification of those events through a medium i.e. painting, language.

One can consider a painting a narrative in this case, looking at a painting you try to decipher the initial state of the subject matter and then draw insight by comparing what you perceive to be the initial state to the painting. But this is just my 2 cents on the subject.closest_view_of_book_page_rose

Time

As the saying goes time flies when you’re having fun, according to this statement I can safely assume that time is only as long or as short as how one perceives it.

The feeling of playing a good game makes one feel like a short time has passed while playing it while in reality hours or even days have passed!Video games shortens transport times or at least how we perceive that long boring train ride to work or school.
games-harmful-810x542