Game Stories Reading Week 10

 Game Stories

Game story is very important and it is necessary for most of the games.Today I read two assays about game stories and what is important for game developers to know about game stories.First assay is "What Every Game Developer Needs to know about Story so this one I think is very interesting and explains a lot about game stories and things that you should know and consider when you are making a game.So this is the most interesting things that I have found for myself in the assay:

A Starting Place

"Okay, to really get this right, we have to talk about story in general. What has always worked, and what will work in every form of story, including games? 

We could go back to Aristotle's "Poetics," but a more useful reference is from that curmudgeonly guru of Hollywood screenwriters, Robert McKee, author of the book, Story, which is based on his many three-day intensive story structure lectures. 

Some people have their doubts about McKee, based on his personality, or his emphasis on structure, or simply suspicions of his massive following. But here's something to consider: He's right. Deal with it. 

Now I'm reasonably sure McKee has never played a video game in his life. He certainly never mentions it in his work. But that's where we come in. If we are to develop games into the fairly advanced story form that movies have become, we need to start by learning everything movies had to learn, and McKee's Story is the place where that is best summed up. I'll touch on the main points here, but make the reading of that book your homework assignment. Lots of what I'm going to talk about comes from him. 

The real substance of story, as McKee points out, is CONFLICT. Did I already say that? Good. I'm repeating myself on purpose. If you remember nothing else, remember this. Story is conflict. 

This is no trivial point for game developers. This has huge implications for how we plan our productions cycles, and how story is best presented in the game. For one thing, the conflict is part of the structure, which means it needs to be planned from the beginning of the development process." 

How Classical Stories Move

"There are a couple of very good reasons for game developers to know about classical story structure: 

  • It's simple. 
  • It works. 

What I'm going to tell you is not something that will confine your creativity. On the contrary, if you keep this basic structure in your back pocket, it will save you loads of trouble throughout your creative process. And this is not merely a theory from Aristotle. This has been put into practice by story tellers of all kinds for thousands of years. You could say it has been thoroughly tested. 

  • First, there's a protagonist, a hero. 
  • His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.) 
  • A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life. 
  • The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails. The world pushes back too hard. 
  • The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back. 
  • Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up. 
  • The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap. 
  • After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap. 
  • The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life."
  • Link to the text I have provided!

Also the video that has been provided was really cool and it explains that the game developer makes you think that your choice and what your doing is really affecting the story in a game but it actually doesn't the game just does what it supposed to be doing no matter how you play and what kinda of choices you are making.Which was a bit surprising for me but if you think about it that's the reality of how games are made.But apart from that I really like the way that it makes you think and it gets you involved to the point that your actually thinking that you can do something that will have effect on the game and I personally never thought about that.But the video is very interesting because it shows how to make your game really interesting and how you can develop your own story and make it appealing to the player.


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