Feedback Loop: Long Live the Shooter, the Shooter is Dead

June 13 Comments Off on Feedback Loop: Long Live the Shooter, the Shooter is Dead Category: Feed, Games, Nightmare Mode

The dispatches from E3 seem to indicate that the shooter remains the same. How long can its dominance last? What comes next?

Is it High Noon for shooters? In his latest post on Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott seems to think so. He compares the current generation of shooter games to Westerns in 1959, the last year before they started to disappear.

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

May 09 Comments Off on Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game. Category: Feed, Games, Nightmare Mode

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

Catch up on Narrative Artifacts

September 13 Comments Off on Catch up on Narrative Artifacts Category: Feed, HackText

Getting ready to finish off the series of posts on Narrative Artifacts. Don’t know what a narrative artifact is? Find out with the previous posts in the series.

Related posts:

  1. Expanding your narrative with parallels [Narrative Artifacts: 3 of 4]
  2. Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]
  3. Story vs Narrative vs Plot

Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke

June 17 Comments Off on Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke Category: Feed, Games, Nightmare Mode

Image via Wikipedia

In which Rockstar chooses to whistle Dixie.

I finished Red Dead Redemption and it was a fairly fun game. Despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why.

Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play through Red Dead yourself do so and come back.

Rockstar has a tendency to write reluctant protagonists. Manhunt dealt with a main character forced into action by a threat to his family. San Andreas’s CJ Johnson falls into working with an antagonist to help his own family. Niko Bellic, from GTA4, wouldn’t stop whining about how he wanted to live the American dream in peace, even while he was shooting people. Red Dead is no exception. The main character, John Marston, is so eager to be done with his mission he practically gets killed in the first 30 minutes of the game.

Unlike previous Rockstar protagonists, Marston is justifiably reluctant to go on an armed rampage. Our player character is an ex-outlaw and the FBI is holding his family hostage to get him to kill off his old running buddies. He tried to get out and …