Category: Game Writing

Adventure Fail

So this weekend, I played through one new three-part adventure game, as well as playing the demo of an only slightly older one.

Oh man, they made me rage.

The first thing I noticed was my complete lack of empathy with the player character (in BOTH games), which led to a lack of investment in the goals of the game. I only continued playing them because a) I’d paid $20 for the first, and b) I wanted to give the second a fair chance, considering it’s by an Australian developer.

But I couldn’t get over it. I also couldn’t get over how, despite the stories themselves being fairly interesting, the structure of the stories were so flawed that I was just irritated, left with feelings of “why am I doing this?” and “why isn’t this over?”

This isn’t to say that they didn’t do anything right. There were a few things that impressed me, such as well-planned puzzle arcs and interdependencies. I always like those. Proper reviews to come shortly. But, oh my God (the God of narratives/stories/I think that’s Dionysus? He’s also the God of wine and possibly orgies, so that’s pretty cool), do you want to know why point-and-click adventure games aren’t selling so well? Because the best part of them (the adventure) is so average. The writers… I seriously wonder whether they’ve ever learnt anything about writing for any medium where they have to try to keep the audience’s interest (as opposed to the kind of writing that fills time in transit between more interesting events/locations).

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Prelude to Imagined Situations

A friend of mine writes children’s stories, and is blogging about to process. She just wrote a blog post about sad stories: how much she loves them, and how she doesn’t feel like she can write them. A particular line caught my eye:

So in a way, I guess sad stories have been a release for me when I feel down and am unable to express myself adequately in real life. Instead, I can escape into a sad book and feel emotion through the veil of the characters.

Whether that’s healthy or not, I can’t say.

But, for all that sad stories capture me and offer a release, I cannot seem to write a story that has a sad ending.

So I wrote her a LONG reply. I’ve (barely… I removed half a line) edited it a little for here, but I’m putting it up because it’s on the same thread as a blog post I’m preparing that’s a little more “academic.”

Regarding whether it’s unhealthy to enjoy the experience of someone else’s misfortune via a sad story or whatever- well, I am writing a blog post about this, but no, it’s not.

Tragedy was considered a very important part of Ancient Greek culture- it guarded against excesses of virtue/vice. It caused the audience to first feel horror at the experience of the hero, and then feel relief that it wasn’t happening to them, followed by a fear that it COULD.

Aside from this, there is enough research into play and fantasy, especially of negative emotions. These emotions occur to us, we all know they do. We like to feel fear on rollercoasters, we like to cry over sad stories. But we don’t want to really be falling for our lives or have something sad happen to us. Hence, we enjoy experiencing them in Imagined Situations (Vygotsky’s term for it), suspending our disbelief (see Coleridge), but deep down knowing that we’re safe. Do we enjoy the actual experience, or reawakening safe? I’m not sure.

I just went largely off-topic based on one line you wrote :) But I think that while sad/tragic/scary/horror stories have their place, so do happy stories. We all want to believe that we can achieve something great. We want to see someone like us achieve happiness. We want to feel happy for someone we deem worthy. I don’t actually believe they are opposites, but they complement. I love Hans Christian Andersen, but I love the Grimm brothers as well as the similar stories Dad has read me from Slovakian folklore. I also always loved Aesop’s fables. Many of these are extremely abstract and use large amounts of symbolism. They are warnings, they are moral. They had poor narrative structure sometimes. They often involved something potentially very bad happening, but then order being restored. They were warnings that at the end said, “It’s okay. Don’t live your life naively, but don’t live in constant fear.”

I also loved Little Golden Books and one called Whistle For Willie, which was about a little boy who couldn’t whiste to call his pet dog. I think in the end he learned how to whistle? But I loved just being in his world, drawing on the pavement with chalk with him. Every story has its place. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a happy place for a little while :)

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Epic fail.

Want to knnow why I haven’t posted anything in a while?

My laptop’s screen died for the second time. I am having it replaced, and it’s taken over a week to get the new screen in.

Meanwhile, I’ve been using my old desktop computer, which was infected by a Trojan four days later through what I can only assume was an infected blog post that I read about something innocent like fashionable hairstyles of the 1900’s. I’ve cleaned it up (thank goodness my parents had spare licenses with their Norton account), but… urgh.

At least I got my HTC Desire, where I can actually browse the internet and sent emails in a relatively trouble-free manner. So that’s where I’m at. I can’t finish a lot of my writing because it’s on my absent laptop.

I am also attempting to balance my body more my training myself to use the mouse with my left (non-dominant) hand. I’ve tried brushing my hair and brushing my teeth with my left hand, and it’s pretty hard to do. Maybe the next step will be writing with both hands…

Also, I have bought some cards for NaNoWriMo, on which I plan to write such phrases as, “B has an exciting story to tell A,” and “D knows B’s secret.” The idea is to draw one of these at random every day (two if necessary), and then use that to guide the ~2k words I need to write to hit the target of 50k in a month. I also have other cards on which I’m going to write types of characters, places, times, etc, to generate concepts for writing challenges. I got the idea because I thought about two of my favourite flash games, Zombie Hooker Nightmare and Robot Unicorn Attack, and how it sounds like they just took two random things and another word and developed a game around that idea. I don’t know if they’re developed by the same people, and if so, if that’s what they did, but it seems like a good idea to me.

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Research on Web Content Viewership

Recently I saw this report on the behaviour of viewerd of web content vs that of tv.

There are a number of interesting results regarding demographics and percieved value (ie how much they want to watch it) and the social/viral nature of web content’s success.

But most interesting to me was the level of engagement that viewers typically afforded to web content.

Similar to what I suspected, viewer behaviour is somewhere between the typical behaviour of film viewers and television viewers: not as loyal and stead fast as film viewers, but not as promiscuous and you’d-better-keep-me-entertained-because-I’ll-totally-leave-you-for-another-station’s-show.

What I take from this is that, again, the structure is bound to develop into something similarly hybrid between the two types.

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National Novel Writing Month

OH MY GOD!

I just remembered that November is National Novel Writing Month!

When I was 16, I started writing a novel. It was going to be part of a trilogy and everyone I showed the four chapters to seemed to really enjoy it. Then I guess exams and university got in the way. Or I became self-conscious. Either way, those four chapters were all I ever got done.

But now, here’s an excuse! And a deadline! And it doesn’t have to be good, because that’s not the point 🙂 So I’m going to attempt something I’ve always really wanted to do, but always been too afraid of. That’s right, I’m going to write a Murder Mystery!

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Fables from the Future

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with a couple of writing premises I’ve had rolling around my head for a couple years. It took me to explaining them to a friend of mine to really notice that they were both Science Fiction.

Now, I’m not the biggest SF fan… I mean, basically my entire awareness of them is the Red Dwarf series, and Brave New World (oh, my beloved Aldous Huxley, how I only put off reading more of your books because I have too many research books to read!) But when I try to write short stories, I seem to go for Science Fiction. I once had a SF short story published in an anthology of student writing when I was in year 9 or 10… Actually that’s not as impressive as it sounds. But still!

So I decided that these two stories should be pushed out into short story format, and then I’d try and write some more, and create a set of fables or cautionary tales (I loved Aesop’s Fables and Grimm’s Tales growing up!)

So I guess, stay tuned for the first of these, which I think is probably about half done, at around 700 words.

Hm. I just realised that my PhD supervisor (who was my Honours supervisor) is a SF buff 😉 I might hide them from her!

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