While I understand that it is the process and principals of video games that Jim Gee is interested in, I would like to speak for a moment about their content, and the possible applications of it. I spoke briefly in class about video game narratives, as a genre, and I would like to expand on that idea here.
When I was young and had the urge to write a story, I only ever wrote in one form: video game narrative. I would spend weeks or even months on one idea: drawing maps and pictures of the world, writing notes about the environment, discovering characters and creating histories. My notes were extremely detailed, because the assumption was that the player would be able to interact with all aspects of the world, and I had to devise exactly how the world would respond to this interaction. In addition to this type of writing, I would also create a somewhat linear narrative that would serve as the central narrative for the game. This narrative kind of resembled a tree, as it would have changing parts, depending on player action.
While the process of writing this narrative may or may not have resembled that of someone in the beginning stages of devising a novel, I HAD to consider it as the start of a game, specifically. I had to imagine the story as one that would be experienced specifically by playing through it. The way one experiences a narrative in the form of a video game seems to be specific to the genre; you have to work for the story. You cannot learn what happens next until you earn that information; you are very actively engaged in discovering the narrative.
Additionally, because video games are primarily a visual genre, there are aspects of the writing that would be similar to that of writing for the stage or the screen. The aesthetic of the game, visually, contributes significantly to how the game is read. I spent a lot of time imagining and trying to put down in words the intended atmosphere of the game: the way it looks, the way it sounds, how players move through space, how items react to being touched. All of the these components contribute to how the player reads the game and experiences the narrative, just as how angels, lighting and music affect the viewing of a film. I would have notebooks full of notes and pieces of prose dedicated to games I was writing, focused on these details.
I bring this up to suggest that my experience of pleasure writing video games cannot be more sophisticated or intensive than the process of writing a video game that is actually made. What I am trying to say is that this thoughtful engineering lies behind all games with rich narratives. As such, they are just as valid as film, literature, or theatre for study and critique.
1 response so far ↓
elaineyhk // Jul 18th 2014 at 12:05 pm
I absolutely agree that video games often involve very rich narratives that can actually be very thought-provoking. I actually experience video games more through the narrative than the game-play itself. Over the past year and a half, my boyfriend has been teaching me to play all his favourite games of his childhood and others that he enjoys playing. I had never played many video games until this point, and I was very inept at handling a controller. I also often forgot what I had read and kept losing myself in the narrative. My ineptitude really frustrated me (and my boyfriend), but I was motivated to keep playing because I wanted to know how the story ended. I think this could be a valuable way of connecting with the story for a student who is the opposite of me in that he/she has a gaming background and can make a story more understandable by relating it to structures of video games.
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