Kayin

Kay

@Kayin

Digitial Demon Girl

Gendermongrel Game Dev who is terminally horny and needs to log off. Creator of IWBTG and Brave Earth: Prologue (In theory).

Find me anywhere after cohost closes by looking for kayin, kayinn or kayinnasaki

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Kayin
@Kayin
sylvie
@sylvie
sylvie
@sylvie

junkoid

i likedit a lot.... want to write more but im so sleepy

sylvie
@sylvie

stories, narratives, worlds

i've been thinking a lot lately about what i want from games. animal well perhaps prompted these thoughts most strongly, because it's a well made game in a genre i like which explores concepts i'm interested in and i enjoyed my time playing it, but it still left me somehow unsatisfied. why do other games, like void stranger, completely enthrall me and stick in my mind for months after? why did i stay up until 5am playing dragon slayer iii: romancia?

Kayin
@Kayin

moreover, i'm starting to think that "worlds" are kind of the same thing as "narratives".

I'm like sickos.png-ing this is the truth!!!

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in reply to @sylvie's post:

ItsMeLilyV
@ItsMeLilyV

ahhh, this is really interesting... i've been thinking about games in terms of "surprise", mostly because it's become easier and easier to spot when a game is following a formulaic approach, and i adore anything that really catches me off guard or does something strange but endearing; whether it's a story beat or a mechanical change

but thinking of it in terms of a game's "narrative" is cool too; the idea of breaking an established rule of the game (like hiding your health bar) to create gameplay moments and narrative is both surprising and brings up new emotions in the player... in some ways i'm really happy we have such established "good game design" conventions because twisting them is so much fun

it is funny to hear that animal well doesn't really continue its narrative or unique atmosphere as the game goes on, since at least from an outside glance that seems like a really powerful draw...

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sylvie
@sylvie

i think about games a lot in terms of "surprises" too! maybe the reason it's such an important concept for me is because it's more related to "narrative" than "mechanics" - even if the surprise is a revelation about a mechanic, the fact that it's surprising is shaping the story the game is telling

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laleyou
@laleyou

i had a takeaway about secrets which maybe similar to surprises,- am always trying to find how to represent experiences easily, and it seemed that secrets were a really natural way to include 'tangents'(the main agent of chaos) which are part of personality that is seen in experiences.. so if you have a tangent you can include it in the extent with the ways of a secret and it'll remain surprising/exciting based on how much the world means, which helps capture those tangents right,? want to try and am saying

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IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

A useful narrative concept I find in analysis is backstory vs frontstory. Backstory is lore, things that already happened and are set out for you to find in the game world. Often in text or dialogue. Frontstory is emergent, it's influenced by the action as it takes place in the game. It's related to that sometimes maligned term of ludonarrative, though that term is more narrowly concerned with how the game mechanics tell a story.

Noita is a good example of a game with just enough backstory to make the frontstory hold up. Everything you do in the game makes sense in the game's own narrative terms, and those terms are present in just enough breadth and depth to tease out a meaning. But at the same time, it's still very much an action exploration game, where you don't have to navigate walls of text to proceed.

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