Stories

At the moment we're still really stuck on story. I think the problem is that every time we start talking about ideas we all start thinking about the gameplay and how the game works/looks rather than how to tell the story with the game. How can you tell a story with a game if you don't have a story in the first place? That's the important part we're missing and I feel like we can't make much progress until we have that sorted out.

It's also getting really hard to make decisions. Edrian, Tim and I would like to do a horror story for the game. They didn't tell me about what they really thought until later because they were afraid of disagreement. I told them that you gotta say what you think whether anyone agrees or not because nobody's going to know and nothing gets done if you don't. Anyway, Maggie talked to us about being innovative for the game, how one part of the game has to be really different from other games. For the horror story we're thinking it's the environment the person plays in that can be more interactive. For example, at a certain point in the story a particular scene or atmosphere should be reflected in the space. So maybe the lighting would change, shapes would merge out of the walls, and so on. However, Ben is vehement that horror is the "easy way out" and that you can't have much of a story around horror. I disagree with him to be honest. You can't condemn a genre like that on the assumption that horror stories are made just to scare people and that it's impossible for a horror story to have any deeper meaning. In every genre you have your good stories and your bad stories and every genre has their own code and conventions. The quality and what it means depends on how you write it. It is in no way determined by the genre. So in my opinion the assumption that it's the easy way out and that it can't have a deeper meaning is erroneous. It depends on how you write it.

I think having differing opinions is normal though. This kind of thing also happened last semester when most of us didn't agree with using rockets to make a network. At the end of the day it all falls down to the majority vote.