Comments on: Drama, not Prose: Storytelling in Games

By: Reciprocity psychology – Drama, not Prose: Storytelling in Games [18Aug10] | The Book

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:09:17 +0000

[...] Collaboration in games (and life) is about exchanging favours. If the favours are counted, then a private currency is useful. If they are not counted, do chances of being taken advantage of increase? (JW) Clipped from trippenbach.com [...]

By: Civilization: A Game in Three Acts « Philip Trippenbach

Civilization: A Game in Three Acts « Philip Trippenbach — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:27:21 +0000

[...] without a built-in story. For my money, the best thing about games is that they can let players create and experience a story for themselves, rather than smacking them down into a linear narrative someone else has dreamt up. I’m not [...]

By: Neale Sourna

Neale Sourna — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:57:40 +0000

Fascinating. Found you through the Game Writing Group LinkedIn and their link at Facebook for my group there Game Writing Exchange.

This is how ALL lit that is to be FELT is to be written, whether as setup and game interaction or as an actual fully written text.

Character is everything and drama (the interaction of personality and motives) rules the best writing.

By: trippenbach

trippenbach — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:12:54 +0000

Indeed it is, and I think table-top role playing games are an excellent example of game-based storytelling. Maybe the best.

Table-top RPGs are basically communal storytelling endeavours. It’s really close to improv theatre, with dice and without an audience – LARPing takes this up to the next level, when the players actually act out their player’s feats.

RPGs of the pencil-and-dice kind will always be the foundation of good gaming experiences for me. All those hundreds of hours I spent as a kid and a teenager playing RPGs left their mark, in the shape of an awareness of how mechanics can affect fun and the progress of a story.

By: rustedangel

rustedangel — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:02:59 +0000

I’ve just had the same experience designing a SW tabletop run for the rest of OBJ514. My design process tries to mirror Deus Ex – a game with very strong prose narrative, but extremely open-ended environments and situations through which to experience it.

You may or may not have heard that IW’s robot character got killed saving my padawan a few adventures back. His new guy is a charming scoundrel – just the kind of PC he’s best at playing. The storytelling process is a happily organic one – I put words in an NPC’s mouth and IW comes up with classic dialog. At the end of the new guy’s first session, the other players comment on how much fun it is to play around the new PC.

It’s a very happy circumstance that we do not need to worry about the quality of player that we interact with. This is a good thing – designing a good campaign is hard enough as it is.

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:54:54 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by JamieMadigan: Interesting thought on how reciprocity helps transform total strangers into teammates in Left 4 Dead 2: http://tinyurl.com/yah6vn6…

By: Mina

Mina — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:26:16 +0000

Very interesting article.

Glad to have read this. It gave me another view on how to design really good games.