Category: My Work

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A bit about the Author…

Eric Zimmerman makes games and teaches game design. Zimmerman has taught at universities including MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, Parsons School of Design, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design and School of Visual Arts. Beginning in 2010, he serves as an Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, within the Tisch School of the Arts.^[2]

Other readings 

http://ericzimmerman.com/portfolio/essays-and-articles/

Some interesting projects

http://ericzimmerman.com/portfolio/cross-my-heart-hope-to-die/

After reading this, i did a little google search about who this person is. I browsed through quickly some of his works and came upon this article,  – Manifesto for a Ludic Century.

I took a quick look and found three interesting points

1. Gaming literacy can address our problems
2. In the Ludic Century, everyone will be a game designer.
3. Games are beautiful. They do not need to be justified.

I then drew parallels to what that meant for games and what meant for stories and came to a conclusion, which I will try explain.

I’ll come back to this three points in a moment, let me first explain my feelings about the reading.

I found the given reading rather interesting as it redefines and even refines the idea of games and interactive narrative to me and one paragraph resonated with me, much more strongly than the others.

“What am I after? I’f I’m intersecting games and stories to create something new out of the synthesis of both, my aim with the concept of narrative should not be to replicate existing narrative forms but to invent new ones. The commercial game industry is suffering from a peculiar case of cinema envy at the moment…”

This made me think.

We cannot and should not define our understanding of game narrative by the way older mediums have defined their own narratives, this is not to say that there is no credit to that but games have to evolve beyond those experiences. We as game designers need to approach stories in a much different way than how a story teller or even a film maker would see the stories.

I used to define games by a spectrum, with two ending ranging from Narrative to Play.  What interests me most as an artist is to look for ways where we can “play stories and read games”.  Zimmerman made me rethink this idea. There isn’t just 2 elements, but 4. He also cleverly defines each of them to help us better understand this.

These four concepts overlap with each other, and instead of looking at what separates them, I would like to take a moment to look at what over laps.

I’ll be talking about two of it for today, maybe some day when I find the will do write more, I’ll finish it proper.

Let’s look at the two overlaps.

1 Narrative + Play =  Amnesia // the blank character story

2 Narrative +Interactivity = Between two doors // the space between choices

Here’s  something we seen way too many times. Amnesia games.

Characters who have no memory of who they are, where they come from or even their name.  This is so common in game stories…

Why?

2 reasons.

1.It begins the story ‘in media res’, or in the middle of. While most stories start up in act 1, games typically start of in act 2, where the action is already happening and then player gets to play in the role of the character, either in a war zone or in a pursuit of a murder. Stories that start with this opening typically get into the action faster and hence, get to the ‘play’ faster.

2. The idea  of a ‘blank slate’ in games. The idea that you ARE the character, and the idea that the blank slate is more immersive because they play as themselves or who they want to be.

TBC */