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.