Week 8 - Storytelling in games

After meeting the real life Game Art Director, I think I will follow his helpful advise and work in the games industry for a while before I statr my own comapny to get the contacts and make friends in the industry, he was helpful and answered all my questions and it really helped mme with planning for the future as I now know what I need to do.

It also gave me a plan for when I do get my own companmy as to what the sort of timelines we would have for games art design per game.

It was an awesome expericance and I look forward to the next guest lecture.

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Now to week 8's task -

Stories are often the part that holds me at ransom in a game.

David Freeman was once quoted as saying;

""Emotioneering"™ is the term I created to describe a body of over 1000 techniques for making game emotionally immersive. That is, they evoke, in a player, a wide breadth and depth of emotions. I believe that all techniques to make games emotionally engaging fall into 34 categories. These categories include:
* Techniques to get a player to identify with the character he plays;
* Techniques to get a player to bond with an NPC (a Non-Player Character)
* Techniques to give an NPC a quality of emotional depth, even if the NPC speaks just one line of dialogue.
* Techniques to take the player on an emotional journey
and many others. Those are just a few categories of Emotioneering techniques. There are 30 others."

This is true, a good story in a game will capture a player, forcing them to play on and lose themselves in the game, forgetting concepts like time and food as they're drawn ever deeping into an emotional rollercoster that only ends when the story is over, and the THE END screen is sat starting at you and you're left thinking, now were did the last seven hours go?

And to achieve this you have to hire a writer that knows the genre and can write a good story, and works well with your creative team, if they don't then problems can arise.

As an author I know all to well that to engage an audiance you need characters that seem real and alive, as opposed to flat and lifeless, and no MARY SUES, characters have to seem human, to have human flaws and weaknesses instead of seeming invincble, a fighter will lose sometimes, a mage will drain themselves... etc.

In some games the storyline is quite liniar, and in others things you do in the game change events in the future and it is these games that draw the bigger crowds because everyone gets different endings and so everyone borrows/lends/steals it from th eothers and discusses it leading to others buying it and the cycle goes on and on.

Storylines play a big part in most games, though no one really cares why the hell you're racing arouond the tracks in a racing game, and as such they are really important.