I just want to start this off with my personal thoughts of going on right now. So when we were going over the semester long projects on Thursday, I felt a bit stressed. Overall looking at the work it doesn’t look too bad, but I tend to get carried away with my stress to the point where, the scenario is really close to the worst possible way the events turn out. This may seem like a bad way to view life; for me it’s been effective because it keeps me on my toes. My initial idea for the research project was to do the paper, since it might be easier to convey my thoughts through text. Once I started thinking about the second multimedia project option, it didn’t seem like the worst idea in my head, but I’m having trouble with the part where the gameplay has to go along with what I’m arguing. What I was hoping for with the multimedia option is I make my point and the gameplay has less to do with what I’m talking about, basically I wanted to do this in podcast format, rather than trying to make the gameplay go along with my argument. Now with the game project, this peaked my interests in terms of initial concept, but I’m stuck about a few things: first I don’t know what type of game I want to make (like if I wanted to make an rpg, or visual novel), second the story of said game, and third I’m worrying that since I’m new to making games that might limit me a lot. 

Moving on to what we talked about in class this week, so the whole idea behind the balance of narrative within games. The examples brought up during class were Kings Quest and BioShock Infinite. These games took two approaches to world building to develop the story and add substance to the games. Kings Quest left it up to the player to find meaning with the bare bones story. So in this instance even though the game didn’t flesh out the story there can still be complexity behind the face value of the gameplay. An example where people argue this idea is with Tetris where the game itself doesn’t tell a story, but people read in between the lines, and argue there can be a deeper interpretation of the game: the game can be seen as a microcosm of everyone’s daily day to day life and how we all get caught up trying to manage so much, and at some point people reach their limit. In comparison a game like BioShock Infinite the game takes the time to flesh out the world through direct and indirect means to help immerse the player in the universe it is set in. This game can also be seen with a deeper story than what’s being shown, but this time the initial story is more expanded upon. Now people are having the dispute of if world building makes a game better or lack of world building can make a game worse, with games that don’t spend too much time with a story or world building, it’s up to how much the player wants to put in, when talking about looking for deeper meaning in these games (the effort one puts in can equate to what they get out). On the other side of the coin games that put in time to put effort into the initial story/world, the player doesn’t have to think as deeply about it, but the option is still there too. There’s no right answer to this, it is what the player wants to put in to decide what they want out of the games they’re experiencing.