Today my friend Athomas and I were discussing a favorite topic of ours — the fact that traditional games such as Monopoly and chess create a dramatic structure that is like a linear narrative (but is not a linear narrative) through their well constructed rules of game play. The natural progression from early play to mid-game to final battle comes entirely out of the well-crafted “physics” of the game, not through post-facto<\/i> act of imposed coercion and narrowing of player choices (as in some computer games).<\/p>\n
I raised the question of whether one could target a specific well-understood genre of narrative, such as the hero’s journey, or the romantic comedy (genres that have a very clear and definitive structure, well understood by authors and intuitively recognized by audiences), and create a game that invokes in its players an equivalent emotional arc and meta-narrative.<\/p>\n
It would be particularly cool if this could be done without computers — simply through such relatively traditional means as moving pieces on a physical board, rolling dice and the choosing of chance cards.<\/p>\n
More to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today my friend Athomas and I were discussing a favorite topic of ours — the fact that traditional games such as Monopoly and chess create a dramatic structure that is like a linear narrative (but is not a linear narrative) through their well constructed rules of game play. The natural progression from early play to … Continue reading “Games that generate stories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6987,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6985\/revisions\/6987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}