Interactive Drama

I am not going to be presumptuous, and I am not going to assemble a list of the best films of all times, and I am not going to do this with books as well..

And I'm not the one to say what the magic formula for making a great game is, but I am trying to figure out what would make a game a "classic" in all senses.

I'm going to try to find an answer gathering any information I can from industry, scholars, articles.

Gamasutra is a good place to start. But I will also check with some industry veterans like Tim Schafer, Chris Crawford, Ernest Adams.... I'll see what they wrote, and maybe I'll try to get in touch with them if I have further questions.

I was talking to a friend of mine and that made the whole game designing idea a little clearer to me. I like adventures, I loved all the LucasArts adventures, and I like the "action/adventure" genre, however I always thought that most of them lack a more solid storyline, something more serious, more deep, and yet fun to play.

I thought that Tim Schafer was going in the right direction with Grim Fandango but I never saw development on that, and Grim Fandango is still a single plot narrative.

Whenever you put interaction and narrative in the same sentence you make scholars shiver in their chairs. Because those things are supposed to be nearly opposite. There are people that I mentioned before that are trying to come up with a solution for that.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern came up with an interactive Drama called "Façade". It was a bold move in the direction I am trying to go. I still think that there are some problems with "Façade" because it's a limited set, and the "game" can "end" within a short period if you start swearing at the characters and you kinda can't avoid that, because they're both wankers to begin with. And as the characters throw you out of the door you can't help but linger with the feeling that you have "failed" to accomplish you "mission" whatever that was, and no, you didn't fail, you just led the story to an ending because of your behaviour.

The big clash here is due to the fact that games have winners, and narratives not necessarily do. But I think that is more than that. A narrative has a certain dynamic, like music with it's crescendos and diminuendos. It has a climax, and a closure. I think this feeling has to be translated into the "game".

Mateas tries to encapsulate this in the Façade but there is still a long way to go.

You can check GrandTextAuto for updates on the ideas floating around.

Designing a game

Right...

I haven't been very commited to this blog... so you could say that it's title has no meaning whatsoever. The fact is I have been working with something I love, and everyone knows that (unless your blog is you job) t'is bit hard to be really faithful to it when you have something you consider important to do.

Ok. enough of explanations. Let me get to what I want to do.

I want to design a game. Silly really because I already work in the game industry, which was the whole purpose of this blog anyway. However, I feel like I could spread my wings a bit and try to come up with an idea that will not only satisfy my ego, but will also be accounted as a innovative game design.

Chris Crawford told my friend that Game industry is dying... I say: "I beg you pardon". Well I wasn't there for the conversation but the whole point is that although the Game Industry has been there for a good 35 years, there has not been one masterpiece...

Well... I kinda cringed when I heard that. How can someone say that? Then I stopped to think a little. Although I have played some very good games, and I used the word masterpiece more than once. I couldn't find one single original title that could be the... uh... "Citizen Kane" of the games.

I think what he was trying to say was that the game industry is yet to reach it's "maturity" and it's heading the wrong way or, in other words, game industry is a 40 year old teenager that does not intend to grow up.

If you have the right arguments to convince me of the contrary...please... I am willing to take anything to save my beliefs.

No game made me cry... And I bloody cried in E.T. so... let this be a challenge...

The first game that makes me cry will be the one I consider the first masterpiece... FFVII almost did it...but still... .didn't make it.

Meanwhile... I'll try to come up with something that can come close to that. I'm not going to be so bold to set "Citizen Kane" as my target. Ok... first of all I'll try to create a list of "masterpieces" be that in cinema or literature...

I want to tell a story that would be a good story, and that could be considered a masterpiece.

Thus begins one's journey to knowledge.

First step... I need to make a list of "masterpieces"...

EDIT: in Mauricios Comments

Mauricio said...

...we met after a conference he made in Barcelona and were in a group walking in the streets looking for a place to drink and eat something.
Second: yes, he once stated that "video games are dead" (Gamasutra, June, 2006). But that wasn't what he said to me.
I was telling him about mi interest in studying games narrative potential and asking him about the relations between games and narrative and Crawford's told me that he thinks that "games have nothing to say to narrative". In other words, seems that he doesn't think that games could be (or become) an innovative or legitimate narrative form.
The discussion was a little deeper than that, but the main idea was that he thinks that studying games would be of little help in trying to find out how to create good interactive storytelling.
The thing is: Crawford is well known for his work experience in game industry and research and in some point he realized (or decided) that games were not the path for him to follow.
Anyway... I strongly disagree with him about the narrative potential of games... but I've got to respect his opinion.