Choose a game which you feel attempts to incorporate strong narrative elements. Answer one of the following questions, in 400 words or less.

Discuss the tension between agency and narrative structure within the game. Do you agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist? Why/why not?

Having played so few computer games, the only game with a strong narrative I’ve had experience with would probably be one of the first Pokemon games to come out on the Game Boy and the computer, Pokemon Yellow. Pokemon Yellow was released in 1999, when I was still in Primary school, and being a closet fan of Pikachu then, I used to secretly play it on my brother’s computer.

Pokemon Yellow is an example of a typical progression game with components of emergence. The kernals in the game/narrative are basically set. The satellites, on the other hand, can be explored freely, giving the user an illusion of high interactivity and freedom.

The main aim of the game was to collect a total of 8 badges from the ‘grand masters’ in a certain order. This order followed the same order used in the Pokemon series. Pokemon caught also have the same strengths and weaknesses in the game as it does in the series. Through the game, I feel that the player lacks global agency, but holds a lot of local agency. When fighting with other pokemon masters, the player can choose which of his pokemon to use, which would affect the outcome of the battle. Many small choices have to be made, which will show immediate responses.

The creators of the game managed to give players a limited amount of global agency. A feature which comes closest to global agency is the choice the player makes around the beginning of the game, choosing which pokemon to capture and which to train. This would affect the battles fought at a later stage. However, because Pokemon was set as a narrative which coincides with the TV series, I feel that some aspects of the game had to be compromised. For example, the player never dies. If a battle is lost, the player merely faints and starts the level again. Also, the game is set within fixed boundaries, and the player doesn’t have much space for real time story generation.

I somewhat agree that narrative and HIGH LEVEL interactivity cannot coexist. Taking Pokemon Yellow as an example, the narrative was built through conversations one had with different Non-Playing Characters. I feel that in the creators’ almost desperate need to include narrative into the game, conversations were directly copied and pasted from the TV series to the game, making it slightly out of context and irrelevant, especially for players who have never watched the TV series. However, the overall narrative could be figured out, and a substantial amount of moderate interactivity which managed to create variations in the game was included.

I choose question 2.

Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

Our group did ‘Scarytales’ for our first project, a spoof of fairytales. Although I wouldn’t consider our group project a game, it is pretty obvious that there were some aspects of gaming and play in it.

In ‘I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games’, Greg Costikyan defines a game as ‘an interactive structure that requires players to struggle toward goals’. Many of these points he used were similar to that of other writers such as Zimmerman and Caillois. Though Scarytales wasn’t meant to be a game, many areas in our project fulfilled the requirements of a game according to these authors.

Our group started out with the goal of creating a piece of interactive fiction (IF), something exploratory, using the same concept as ‘The Afternoon Story’, only done in flash. However, as our brainstorming progressed, we felt that adding game aspects would probably make our ‘IF’ more interesting. Thus, the first modification we created in our project was to add a goal- to collect all the necessary ingredients to finally defeat Sadako and save Fairytale Land. Users had to follow set rules (e.g. ‘Do not go to the mountains. YOU WILL DIE.). If users decide to go against these rules (if they try exploring the mountains), they die, and the game is over.

Besides these intentional modifications to the project, Scarytales started out with some aspects of game which also fulfilled requirements of an IF. For example, the project is interactive. Users have to interact with it to fulfil goals and explore the whole story. However, as Costikyan goes on to say, even a light switch is interactive. I feel that Scarytales is interactive primarily because it is greatly influenced by works of IF and secondarily because it’s adopted some aspects of games.

To conclude, Scarytales wasn’t created with the intention of making a game. However, through the various adaptations, it managed to fulfil much of what the professionals consider games. Ultimately, Scarytales is a piece of Interactive Fiction influenced by techniques used in games.