Forum Overview :: Reviews :: See, this guy gets me!

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"][quote]also why isn't it 'do, don't show?' why do rules trump interactive narrative? maybe they just frame it, but if they do it seems like the idea gives undue weight to the frame and none to what's painted on the canvas this metaphor is making me want to kill myself[/quote] I'm going to try and answer this with one of my nostalgic shut-in stories. THE YEAR IS 1992... I'm eight years old, typing games into my Commodore 64 out of a big stack of old 101 BASIC Programs for Kids and Housewives books. At one point, I notice the whitewater rafting game I just spent a whole hour typing up is exactly the same as the Le Mans game I got out of a different book, only they recontextualized the simple on-screen action with different introductory text - instead of guiding a racecar through a field of slower competitors, I was steering a dinghy through dangerous rocks. Even as a little kid who was LITERALLY TOO STUPID to notice he was typing exactly the same thing twice, I intuitively understood that this was a shitty fucking way to tell a story using the medium of video games. Whatever interaction is present in your interactive narrative is the product of rules. You can frame that interaction with different words, dress it up with different colours (like black for asphalt or cyan for water), but ultimately it's the rules themselves that have to shoulder the burden of telling your story. If you truly want to communicate the excitement and drama of being at the mercy of powerful waters, it's not enough to TELL the player he's at the mercy of powerful waters, it's not even enough to SHOW the player he's at the mercy of powerful waters, you have to actually write the RULES to make those supposedly powerful waters a meaningful factor in gameplay. Otherwise you might as well be writing a novel with a goddamn cup and ball glued to it.[/quote]