On September 4th, the University of Texas Videogame Archive held a fundraising event to both raise money and promote the development of the new museum collection. An article over at GameSetWatch listed some of the memorabilia that were auctioned off at the fundraiser; one of those items was a pre-release copy of Emond’s book, “Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide”. A web search yielded few results, and I was compelled to contact Stephen regarding his soon-to-be-published book. He told me that not only was his book auctioned-off at the fundraiser, but he was an invited guest for the entire affair. I asked Stephen a few questions about his experiences at the fundraiser, his interests in the Ultima series, and (of course) his upcoming book.
Book reviews, suggested reads, etc.
Okay, things are finally moving along. Although I’ve actually already read the book in its entirety, I’m back-tracking a bit to catch up on the reviews. This chapter, written by Richard Boon, continues in the tradition of the previous two chapters as being an introduction to more general premises in game writing. The chapter focuses, in general, on the relations between game design and narrative design, and how the two relate.
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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