video games – Page 7 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Heroine’s Journey and Delicious Emily, Portal 2

One definition of a “heroine’s journey” came up here some months ago; I recently wrote more about it for Gamasutra.

Atlus’ Catherine

…is written up here. It’s a very odd balance of puzzler and dating sim, which I didn’t find entirely satisfying in either dimension, and which raises some issues about gender stereotypes but veers off before dealing with the implications.

L. A. Noire Article

Here I talk about what I liked and didn’t like in L.A. Noire. (Quite a lot, actually, in both cases.) My main contention is that the story and gameplay aren’t clear enough about what the player’s role is meant to be — and various game systems pull in different directions.

Homer in Silicon

…now has a discussion of Misfortune, a browser-based RPG with Wizardry-esque questlets and some charming art.

Wunderkammer: The Fiction of Physical Things

Typically a shryng, or altar, was set up in the home with commemorative articles from lost family members. Typical articles were a scrap of clothing, a lock of hair, an amulet, or a favorite razor. Pictures of loved ones were rare and treasured, brought out only on these occasions… For ancestors about whom little was known, Tre-manners used a custom they called “Ricing the Soup.” The unknown relation was given attributes common to all of humanity but in such a way as to make him or her sound individual. In this way the thin back-story of the ancestor’s memory was thickened. — Eli Brown, Excerpt from the forthcoming The Feasts of Tre-Mang

The Feasts of Tre-Mang is a cookbook with real recipes from a fake cuisine and a fake history. “Pamatala Jad-zum”, or “Storm Chowder Pie”, is a seaweed-laden dish served traditionally in memory of those lost at sea, appropriate to the memorial services of the Tre-manners described above.

Chowder-Pie-7 — Storm Chowder Pie. Image rights reserved to Eli Brown at Tre-mang.com; used with permission.

This interview with the author reveals an enthusiastic love of world-building for its own sake. In addition to the context-rich recipes, he has also created currency, propaganda posters, and a flag for Tre-Mang. Even though the book isn’t finished yet, the concept has already poked through into the real world in the form of a Tre-Mang evening at a local restaurant.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects is a project by Adrian Hon of SixToStart, imagining the world to come by highlighting specific items that might be invented or imagined in the future. His project is mostly to take the form of images and essays, but he has promised his Kickstarter funders a few physical rewards, including a newspaper of the future (which tells us, I suppose, that he envisions a future that includes paper-based news) and several 3D modeled objects.

Retropolis is a world envisioned by Bradley W. Schenck, built up around art and images, though the website does also feature some branching CYOA-style fiction. Even in the stories, there’s a feelies-rich delight in physicality, however: inventory items are pictured and have their own descriptions, encouraging the reader to take some time off from the narrative progression to check out the tokens that come with it. Retropolis takes the “do art for free, make your money on t-shirts” concept to the maximum, allowing you to buy everything from clocks to blank journals with Retropolis designs on the cover — it’s the most obviously merchandising approach of these three — but they include tourist postcards and similar objects that are meant to “belong” to their world of origin rather than to our world.

Continue reading “Wunderkammer: The Fiction of Physical Things”

Dan Staines and Malcolm Ryan on moral choice in games

An interesting analysis of moral choice in games, with particular attention to Fallout 3, which makes the argument that choices need to be (a) expressed through extended play rather than through a single choice and (b) involve interpersonal dynamics more complex than the average conversation tree.