Blog Task - Narrative and Games
Narrative
What is a narrative? Well the narrative is effectively the story or the connection between various events. Most games have narrative and very good narratives at that. See you need a good narrative in storyy driven games to keep the player engaged with what they are playing. Without a consistent and well implemented narrative players can start to loose interest or loose a connection to the game. A narrative helps players build a relationship with the characters and care for what happens to them and what choices they make. It can effectively make what would be a boring and monotonous into a deep and meaning task that they want to complete for a certain character because they have built this emotional connection.
Especially with today's high end games the narratives become complex structures with branching storylines and multiple endings and consequences for player actions. You can follow good paths or evil paths even build families all in a virtual world but without that narrative it would be a sequence of button presses and character movement. Its the narrative that brings things to life.
What does a good narrative need?
Well there are three important parts to think about when we talk about a good narrative:
- Protagonist
- Conflict
- Conflict resolution
So we need a protagonist, a character that players can connect with, where players care what happens to them. Then we need conflict for our characters. The story would soon take a turn for the worse if everyone got on all the time and there was no conflicts between our characters. However we do eventually need a conflict resolution and not to leave the player hanging and waiting around with no resolution. The conflict however doesn't necessarily need to be between people you could have indirect conflict like the struggle between man and machine for example.
Its also good to use narrative to imply things and allow a player to paint a picture of what they think it may bee like themselves.
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