Personal Update #1 Brainstorming Narrative and Gameplay

Hey Readers (or anyone really)

I wanted to give a bit of an update on myself, what I am doing, and where my brain is.  Recently most of what I have been posting has been paintings. I will be continuing this into the future, but I have also been preparing for work on some form of interactive side project.

Recently I have been talking with friend of mine about narrative and gameplay, and how they should interact. Here are some thoughts on what has been going through my brain.

We have been talking, specifically, about the idea that gameplay and narrative can be developed, but only in 3 broad ways. The first, is that both are 100% separate. No interaction at all. This is obviously the easiest solution where a mechanic can have nothing to do with the world or story trying to be told.  The second, is that the gameplay comes directly from the narrative. A good example would be super powers in the Infamous games, where the powers in the game tie directly into the universe the game is set in, because the story and universe is about super powers. This is ideal because when the player "plays" the game, they are reinforcing the overall immersion of the experience.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks come in the form of restrictions. Usually choosing this option means you have to sacrifice more and more of the environment and narrative to make things make sense, or alternatively sacrificing gameplay to fit into your world.  Finally the third option, is one of the opposite of the previous, where narrative is formed around gameplay. A cool mechanic (like surfing dreams for example) is a neat idea, and a story could be written to form around that basic idea, rather than vice versa. The downside of this technique means you usually very limited in the types of narrative you want to do.

Over the last few days, I have been thinking lots about the various blends between these ideas as we (me and my friend) have been trying to find a mechanic that really fits our narrative (which we have a pretty solid idea of). On one hand, the easy solution is the reason we see so many disconnected puzzle exploration games, where the "game" part sits separately from the "narrative" part. Once you decide that you want the mechanics in your game to really tie into narrative, it becomes a creative quest to try things out and push out from there.

Anyway, just some brain blots as I continue forward. I should be starting a new weekly render analysis to break down some visuals from well known stories, and will also be posting some more technical work as I move forward.

Thanks for reading,

Alex