In response to my post yesterday on games as generators of narratives, Sharon pointed out that she never thought of Monopoly<\/i> as a story, and she noted the absence of characters. To clarify: When you play Monopoly<\/i> (or chess, for that matter), you<\/i> are the protagonist. The wonderful thing about narrative games is the opportunity for you to take responsibility for the adventure, rather than merely passively watching it from the outside.<\/p>\n
If one were to create a romantic comedy game or a hero’s journey game, I would think that each player would take on a key role — perhaps hero or heroine, villain or mentor, best friend or hand of fate.<\/p>\n
It would be interesting to personify aspects of a story that are essential but not usually personified. For example, in a hero’s journey game, a player could choose to play the journey itself. This would have the interesting benefit of illuminating the structure of such stories, so that players were aware of them.<\/p>\n
After all, when Elizabeth Magie<\/a> created The Landlord’s Game<\/i> in 1903 (the game that evolved into Monopoly<\/i>), her explicit ethical goal was to teach children how unfair rights for property owners lead to the impoverishment of tenants.<\/p>\n Alas, that’s not the lesson most children end up taking away from Monopoly<\/i>. Instead, most players are happy to end up with everybody else’s money and property. Come to think of it, maybe it’s a good thing it wasn’t called The Genocide Game<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In response to my post yesterday on games as generators of narratives, Sharon pointed out that she never thought of Monopoly as a story, and she noted the absence of characters. To clarify: When you play Monopoly (or chess, for that matter), you are the protagonist. The wonderful thing about narrative games is the opportunity … Continue reading “Games that generate stories, continued”<\/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\/6988"}],"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=6988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6990,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6988\/revisions\/6990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}