Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Critiques: We're not exploring

Had critiques today and the main feedback was that we're not exploring storytelling at all, no evidence of it. Yes, I agree with this to be honest and that's what we're stuck on.

We're supposed to be exploring methods of storytelling within a game rather than the game and how its mechanics works. We haven't done this frankly. We've been to focused on the details of the game rather than the story.

Afterwards we had heaps of help from Jenny to help us out of this horrible place. She's really good to talk to for feedback. She told us that it might help to pick apart out original question and start from there and gave suggestions on how we could explore storytelling.

What does exploring mean? Finding something that's new to you, maybe it's not "new" but was always there before and you didn't notice it. Searching, finding out about something. Testing how something works.

What is a story and how is it told? We need more research to do with this and how storytelling changed over time. Split up bits of how story is told though, only some aspects we can think of. There's probably more. There's perspective (omniscient, first person, third person, etc), time (is this a flashback, happening right now, or hasn't happened?), and voice (what's the tone of the story? What style of voice is it told in? Comedy, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, etc? Different genres have different voices and conventions, of course the voice also changes according to the timbre of the author. For example, what would it be like if Shakespeare wrote George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?).

It would be best and be more of an exploration of how stories are told in games if we had a really simple story and used different ways of telling the same story instead as opposed to deciding on ONE method of telling a story and having one game. When you just have one, it's not really exploring. When you have multiples of the same story, but told differently then that's really exploring methods and elements of story.

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