« Making Emotions Work for You | Main | BadmintonTrainerV2 »
Oct
11
"Narrative" Wiki Contribution
I thought the Henry Jenkins article, Game Design as Narrative Architecture was tremendously elucidating. He really hit the nail on the head on many points and I found myself agreeing with practically everything he said about the various forms of narrative in games. I find myself wishing that we had used this article as a guide for picking and choosing games for our "narrative in games" demo unit.
I thought Jenkins's point about how game designers are more often world building rather than storytelling to be an especially potent idea. Well-crafted universes are, more often than not, the keystones to telling an interesting story and when a fictional world is fleshed out more than the original story requires, it is a fantastically fertile ground for fans to develop their own narratives.
Perhaps this is the one part of game narrative that Jenkins neglected to talk about, which is community created content. There are a great many games that have not only developed fantastic worlds for their players to explore, but they have even provided the tools for them to expand the original worlds to create their own content. Jenkins touched on it a little with Sims and the idea of "emergent narratives", but fan-created content can easily go beyond the bounds of the immediate game.
Bioware's "Neverwinter Nights" comes to mind, an RPG based on the table-top "Dungeons & Dragons" rule set, which certainly has its own nerd following. The Neverwinter Nights game that you purchase comes with a number of official campaigns that were created by Bioware themselves, resulting in some number of hours of entertainment. But on top of that, Bioware included the Aurora toolset, which allowed players to create their own campaigns. These could then be hosted, allowing other players to come and play the custom content. Suddenly you had hundreds of people creating a whole slew of new content for others to enjoy and experience, which can expontentially extend the lifetime and replay value of the original game. Blizzard's "Warcraft 3" game had a similar tool, the Warcraft Map Editor, that also inspired many players to take their fates into their own hands. While some of these user-created adventures did not necessarily draw upon the original game's lore (sometimes called "alternate universe"), many others did create new stories within the same universe, which is a strong tribute to how well the original world had engaged them.
Even for games who have not directly provided tools, community created content can still be found. Machinima, or the practice of creating movies by filming in-game avatars, would have to be the most obvious example of this phenomenon and many games have found themselves to be willing recipients of this particular kind of fan worship.
While I am certainly interested in the narrative that a designer puts into the main title, I think that this whole aspect of community created content is one that deserves more attention and I am pleased when game developers encourage such activity by providing tools for their players.
