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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March 22, 2007 at 10:53 am
Metche
Hi Chris
I stumbled upon your website yesterday and found it all really interesting. Basically my handle is Metche Steele and i’m the project coordinator of Emmersive Entertainment (http://www.emmersivestudios.com). Our team is researching how we can make games more immersive through the power of emotionally rich narrative. We want to build our own story structure by using modified versions of the 9 act story structure and Propp’s 31 steps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propp).
At the moment we are conceptualising our first game which is an unreal 3 modification called Stellar. The game is a single player RPG with realistic combat elements. It’s basically not far off in it’s premise from a game like Deus Ex, but with the focus being on character development and rich narrative. There is also a focus on action/consequence style of gameplay that is just coming into true effect with commercial games.
If you’re interested I would really love to dicuss our ideas with you further! I apologise for posting here but there is no ‘contact’ page - maybe this is on purpose!
Please feel free to contact me -
I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards
M.