in search of the poetic and lyrical in video games
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Chapter 2 - The Basics of Narrative (Jacobs)
The second chapter of the book is written by Stephen Jacobs - an Associate Professor who teaches graduate-level courses on game history and writing at Rochester Institute of Technology. Jacobs’s chapter contains a short introduction to some of the history of storytelling (both classic and modern) using modern films and literature as examples. Read on below..
Chapter 1 - “Introduction to Game Narrative” (Dansky)
As the Slashdot article mentions, the book begins with an introductory chapter by Richard Dansky - story writer for games such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Far Cry: Instincts. In the beginning of the chapter, Dansky spends time defining and formalizing terms such as ’story’, ’setting’, ‘narrative’ and ‘cut scene’ - terms that are used throughout the rest of the book by other authors in various ways. {1.0}
The Slashdot review and Gamasutra review of Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames do a reasonable job of covering what the book contains in terms of chapter structure and overall content. Unfortunately, I thought the articles were more of an abstract or summary than a review… the authors didn’t spend much time systematically reviewing the individual chapters or the quality of the book as a whole in terms of its creative value, potential audiences, and novelty. In that vein, I thought I’d spend some time teasing apart the book in a more careful way. In this paper I will present a chapter-by-chapter review of the book, and conclude with my own editorial comments afterwards. If you see a numerical hyperlinked footnote at the end of a sentence, that means that I will respond to that sentence in the editorial section (click on it to jump to my response).
Each week I will post a review of a chapter, along with my editorial comments. This week will be my review of Chapter 1.
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