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Tony Robinson L1093383 CSIGThe Importance of Narrative within Games
Introduction • “The importance of narrative within games” • The success of a video game relies on its ability to immerse the player into its narrative, Combining compelling mechanics and an interesting world can help build a more memorable experience. • I’ll be looking at a number of games that I believe have succeeded in their aims and given players an enjoyable narrative experience and why this experience is important to take into account when designing games for the market.
Relation to my degree • In creating games its important to set up a narrative to create an enjoyable and immersive experience for an audience, studying the importance of narrative will give me a better understanding of the use of narrative within games and its effects it has on an audience. • As this is final year module I’ll also be using this as a research point for my games practical project, in which I’m going to create a short narrative experience.
Why I am interested in this area? • Narrative experiences are pretty much why I play games, I enjoy being immersed in a fictional world and getting to feel the atmosphere the creators have tried to create, I'm interested in how a game can make a player feel and what it can leave the player with whether it’s an emotional or intellectual response. • All games have a narrative either determined by their creator or the player, whether its intentional or otherwise. From an industry point of view I want to explore the techniques when creating a narrative experience. I want to also look at the story side of games and see how they feed into a narrative. • I believe a developer would be interested in seeing my findings and hearing my opinions on where the use of narratives to create a memorable experience is taking the medium in the near future.
I have researched the following areas: • I will be looking at past games such as “Dear Esther, Amnesia, Spec Ops: The Line” as well as future titles like “No Man’s Sky”. • I’ll also be using books that look at narrative within games and interactive media such as Narrative across media: The languages of storytelling, Game writing: Narrative skills for videogames • I’ll be using narrative focused journals from Game Studies as well as other papers I can find using reliable sources such as LibGuides and google scholar and siggraph while also storing my citations on a web site known as RefWorks • I’ll ill also be using a number of articles by Ben “Zhatzee” Crowshaw from The Escapist, there also a number of videos based on the subject of narrative by “Extra Credits”
Other Considerations • During this module I’ll be using the research and techniques I've discovered or even created to contribute to my Games Practical Project as I’m focusing on narrative in games for that project.
