Research-a-palooza

I decided to search through the GDC Vault and found a couple of interesting video in regards to narrative design. The first was "When Story is the Gameplay"  , a look at the design of Telltale Games. They were really one of the first game development companies to popularize (and modernize) the adventure games akin to the games you would see on the PC. What I find interesting is that they are not really concerned with how their games are viewed as actual "games", but rather they are more interested in the process of merging story and game as a singular experience. The story itself becomes the game when the focus is on character choice like in The Walking Dead series or how they implement set interactive action pieces that are part of the story in earlier games like Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and later games. Overall, this is a more direct form of narrative design.

The next video I went through was "The Design in Narrative Design", a quick overview of how narrative informs certain game design choices. What I found interesting from this video is how the speaker informs the audience that Game Designers, Narrative Designers, and Writers should all learn skills from each others respective professions in order to have more informed narrative in games. Overall, for successful stories in games, there should a synergy between all artists to create a truly dynamic experience.

I found this video, "Harvesting Interactive Fiction" to be the most helpful so far in relation to my studies. Heather Albano of Choice of Games goes over the evolution of interactive fiction and how it melds into other genres as well. She makes a strong argument that interactive fiction has seen a rise of interest through console, mobile, and smart devices documenting titles that have seen commercial success during that time (2015). Heather also states that the field of interactive fiction is still finding new ways to grow. She shows three tools; Choice Script, Twine, and Inklewriter that are the best for applying and developing interactive fiction techniques and games. I'm strongly considering researching these tools for my project.