This week my main question was focused on Plot: how does problems create challenges for the character? How does character respond to problems, and what does the character's strategies for overcoming challenges tell us about their character? How does the character develop: how does the character adapt their strategies or evolve their strategies?

Questions:

How to embed plot into world, as encounters (narrative architecture).

How to show character development as choices and actions character performs to deal with problems. How does interactivity provide choices in the development?

How to show character development as character states that change how the character looks or how character is animated.

First step: Brainstorm – Game elements and mechanics, Story elements

2.    Map a flowchart of narrative events

3.    Map a flowchart of possible character developments (parallel to narrative beats/events)

–   consider different options for character choices, actions

4.    Map out plot as an interest curve to consider structure

This week I wanted to consider how the characters are designed and animated. What specific possibilities can animation bring to an interactive experience? Action and movement of a playable character or entity is an important thing to consider in interactive experiences, since this will be what the user manipulates and controls. A player is engaged through this embodiment of the playable character.

Returning to the Sims example, Jenkins (2012) points out that characters in the game have different needs that have to be met and how we choose to meet the needs of the characters will affect them. Negative emotional states or tiredness in the Sims will change the way the character is animated, like a stink cloud or drooping figure.

I started work by drawing thumbnails of three different states the character might be in as the narrative progresses, as a “beginning, middle and end” visualisation. The character might be relaxed or bored at the start, distressed and anxious when being dominated by the mum/owner, and experiencing some kind of vengeful delight at the end in flipping the power relationship around.

I then did some dog face studies to look at different expressions of dogs, to help me consider options for character expressions in different states of development.

I also did some thumbnails of dog faces to think about options for shape language and how it might communicate different personalities.

This week my main question was focused on Interactive Storytelling. I am still considering how animation and storytelling functions differently in interactive media and games as opposed to non-interactive animated media. In the back of my mind is the idea of the “Story Machine” (Schell, 2020) – that some games provide worlds and characters that are open to possibilities for how stories can be created through gameplay.

In “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Henry Jenkins sets out to bridge the gap between opposing views of strictly narratological and ludological views on game design. Jenkins proposes that game designers are “narrative architects” rather than storytellers.

•       Immersive narrative storytelling:

•       evoke pre-existing memories and associations

•       provide staging ground where narrative events gets enacted

•       may embed narrative information in the arrangement of scenery, props, etc,

•       provide resources for emergent narratives

•       enacted and embedded narratives:

•       enacted - loosely structured narrative events that player encounters (like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that piece together to complete the main narrative),

•       embedded narrative elements in the world “narratively impregnated mise en scene”)

•       e.g. detective stories: Enacted - character acting and reacting to events. Embedded – backstory and mystery embedded in environment, objects, etc in the world.

Jenkins mentions the example of the Sims as an emergent narrative. Similar to the story machine explained by Schell, the Sims provide “an authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories.”

Using these ideas put forth by Jenkins, I am considering how the world design can create the play space for a narrative experience. I set out to test ideas for how the game's story can be embedded in the world, as well as remain open to different possibilities for interaction.

The premise that I embarked with last week was a teenage dog who basically disobeys her owner/mum and possibly reverses the power relationship. I want to create an environment that has interactive potential for chaos and destruction. The environment could be one that is extremely ordered and organised, to amplify the concept of control. Towards this goal I made a diagram to brainstorm possibilities in the environment that shows an environment of strict control, as well as possibilities of interactions that could result in some fun destruction and chaos.

Reflections:

Considering the idea of an emergent narrative, I would like the potential to be there for a player to have other options for how this story might develop. The player could decide to merely be an agent of chaos, but they could also find other options and become a different kind of character. There might be some puzzles to solve in ways the elements of the laboratory can be used instead to mind-control the human owner. This might perhaps be the only way to progress and even discover more embedded narrative elements, like maybe there is some backstory to the human character that the rebellious dog is unaware of...