Category: Reflections

Narrative for interactivity – Game Review.

There was 3 game that were played in the class,

Her Story which is like a detective like game with pure interface design.
Firewatch which is a narrative heavy first person styled game
and lastly Journey which is a graphic based third person game.

I’ve only played Firewatch and Journey as it appeal to me more due to the graphic content, I think Her Story was brilliantly designed but I was not attracted to play it.

First I will talk about my general analysis of the three game, the game were successful and appealing to many player only because of one thing, Curiosity. in Her story, the game play is designed to trigger the curiosity of the player by feeding them some rewards and clue to another clue, the more clue the player find, the closer they will be to the truth, and the main reason that anyone one want to play this game is because they want to know what truly happened. In Firewatch, same goes to the mindset of playing the game, by choosing different reaction and speech to Delila, the story will go different path and user will want to know how their response to the chat bring them to a different ending, hence many player would replay the game with different choice of reaction to see more ending. although I only start at half of the game in class, this game is not really my cup of tea, maybe because I started halfway and doesn’t know the relationship of the character and Delila. Lastly, Journey feeds on the exploration curiosity in us and make us want to explore the world and try to see a little bit more each stage.

Journey is my favorite game out of the three,simply because the artwork is amazing, although the story was so so, there is no text and such, nothing too complicated and player could relax fully while playing this game, the art direction is brilliantly executed as the color platelet of the game chosen for the background is all light powdery color while the main character is in maroon red with gold, just the color alone made the game and the main character stand out from the background but majority of the screen is the scenery, it shrink the character to visually fit it into the whole composition, suddenly making the breathtaking desert and sun set the main focus of the game, this gives an idea that the world is huge and you are only a tiny character that is moving through the endless desert, trying to find something which may or may not exist.

Year 2 sem 2 – Narrative for interaction – The Four Concept Reflection

The Four Concept is a really interesting piece as it is written in a way that it is a narrative piece on its own with “Initial State”, “Insight Brought about Changes” and “Repetition” which is mentioned under the definition of “Narrative” used as a structure of the essay (mentioning that the four concept deserve a spanking something similar in the essay which I think it is really “playful”)

The first thing that blows my mind is “All narrative is interactive”….. I didn’t think about this before as like our Prof Vladimir asked something like “how can a painting (Wanderer above Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich) be interactive?” and we denied that it is interactive because that it is only a painting and painting doesn’t interact back. But this is not actual case as the fact that when we look at the painting, we will have a thought about the piece like “wow!! What a magnificent view!!” which only happens after we see it. Yes, it does not speak to us, but we feel and think about something because of it and it is the way that the piece of painting is “Speaking” to us when we “View” it. In a sense, this is a two way communication and therefore considered an “Interactive” “Narrative”.

Throughout the Essay, there is a constant classification of ideas into layers which not only interlace, but also was built upon the previous layers, like “Game Play” is built upon “Ludic activity” which is built upon “being playful”, I think this is really interesting as it split the idea of “Play” into different yet similar concepts. While reading this, I copied out a few sentence which gave me ideas that could be used to build into a final project, which are “”narrative have events”, “Cognitive Interactivity” “play -> Rigid rules -> Freedom within the rules”, these ideas helped me to formulate the idea of making a game which fulfills all of the prospects for the project – interactivity and narrativity while giving me the tools I need for producing the game – common knowledge relevant to our class, rules for games, and also freedom within the rules I created.