Exercise 7

The game I am going to talk about is Suikoden 2, a console game on the PS2 machine. . The obvious tension between agency and narrative structure that exists in the game arises from the player’s inability to modify the global agency, as is the case with most role-playing games (RPGs). The game proceeds like a storybook. While you have the local agency to play around with, choosing to spend as much time as you want talking to all the non-playing characters (NPCS), fighting random encounters, at the end of the day the background story is not greatly influenced.

The general plot of the game starts from a revolt by corrupt power holder, following the main protagonist's exile from his/her home, the disastrous misuse of the True Runes, the hero's struggle, despite overwhelming odds, to bring peace to the land alongside his/her friends, and the climactic showdown with the corrupted True Rune. Even though there is technically 3 endings, the main flow of the story line is fixed.

However every player’s experience of it will be quite different depending on the path they took. If some try to get all the 108 stars of destiny, they would in a way experience more of the story plot in comparison to someone who just tries to end the game as soon as possible. Also many of the characters in the game have their own story, like one is being hunted by a group of cooks (!) and if you help him to finish the cooking contest then at the end his ending will be one at peace; otherwise he’ll still be hunted by the group of cooks.

I do not agree that narrative and interactive cannot co-exist. To me, a narrative with a roughly linear path, but with many side tracks that one can choose to explore or not is a good example of narrative and interactivity co-existing together. Furthermore, the ending can be changed slightly due to the interactions of the player with the game. A good narrative should be one that allows a reader to experience the narrative and feels like he is part of it, and if interaction is fostered, the player feels like he has a say in the telling of the story.

I guess the main point of argument would be whether having minute changes that does not really changes the global agency be considered as interaction or not. To me I feel that while the game play is pretty linear, there are so many things the player can do to change his experience of the game. Each run through he could find a new small story about any of the 108 stars of destiny if he search hard enough. To me, that is a good example of narrative through interactivity.

phew.. lucky blogger came back up..

Excercise 6

2. Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

I would personally consider my group's project 1(Prince Charming) to be a game, as that was our aim all along. However is it a game as defined by experts such as Zimmerman?
Zimmerman defines a game to be a voluntary interactive activity. In our project, there is no forcing of anyone to participate in our game. If the audience refuse to participate, he could choose to follow the pre-determined path of Prince Charming, and treat it as watching a movie.

We have pretty well defined boundaries in that the players cannnot do what we do not allow them to do. However, within this rigid boundaries we allow the players via the usage of noise to shift the Prince Charming onto another path during the decision making frame. As Prince Charming is shifted onto a different path, we will actually see a different ending to the story. We do not set specific rules saying what the player can do, however we have a few decision nodes in the game for them to show their preference to the actions of Prince Charming. We even have 1 decision node that was not obviously shown to the players, hoping that if they laugh, they will see a hidden scene that does not really change the ending, kind of an Easter egg.

The clearly defined objective of our project is to save the princess from being killed by the witch. A player's decision should be based on the fact that he wants to save the princess and every decision should be made towards this goal. While it is not specifically said that the ending where the Princess becomes a skeleton is bad, we could hear in class when we saw her becoming a skeleton, the collective gasps of the class. Many decisions in our game seems innocuous at first, however the simple act of deciding whether Prince Charming sees a straw house first or a candy house first is game breaking, as without the candy, one can never save the princess. This gives some uncertainty to our project, as you do not really know what kind of effect your decision will have on the ending.

Thus finally I conclude that our project can thus be considered to be a game, albeit a very simple one.