Journal Response: Week 2

Watching the panel "This Story Isn't For you" made me think about how interactive the player can be with the story I create, especially in a narrative setting. If there's a story to tell then the order of information in which you tell your player is crucial to understand as a designer. Not only that, but making sure the player and the player character both know information at the same time, as telling the player what's gonna happen in advance. Another thing to think about is how your story telling is executed. Watching this as well as reading the other books continue to interest me as there's a lot more to game design than simply balancing a game or describing how objects interact with the player. 

Reading the introduction of Hamlet, the book describes itself to be somewhat of a guide to games that requires players to participate in roleplaying. As someone who does play Dungeons and Dragons weekly I might end up reading more of this as I'm expected to host a campaign sometimes in the future. Though the origins of what Dungeons and Dragons was in the eyes of the player compared to today really shows how far role playing games have come. "Persistence" was changed to "experience", and that experience is what helped players grow attached to characters. Because they would get attached, players would start acting out as their characters and end up creating a story around them. This story would them be integrated into the world that's controlled by the Game Master. Characters would then be classified into different "classes" and this is the foundation of roleplaying games as new mechanics are being added by game masters according to what they want to do. 

Reading "Medium of the Video Game, chapter 5", it talks about the narrative in video games. In a lot of video games we play today there's a "diegetic" word for us to "leap into". This is just another way of saying games today allow us players to be immersive due to it's story telling and worldbuilding. Focused less on the visual, this chapter explains what early video games needed to do in order to give players immersion in their games. For example, some games used magazines or had paragraphs of information to tell the player the story that came with the game cartridge. Some early video games integrated non-playable-characters and had them interact with the players. Overtime, this practical use of NPCs would be the main source of story telling in a lot of games to this day as NPCs would give interactions that had emotion towards players. Because story telling in media evolved so much over the course of many years, it can easily make it's players immersed and even make the emotional while playing the game. I believe being able to get your player immersed in your world and manipulate their emotions is the goal of all story tellers. 

The Stanley Parable is.. a game. no doubt about it, it has rules so it's definitely a game. I don't really know what to classify it as. It's funny, interactive, but also filled with a bunch of random stuff that happens because you as a player want to make decisions that go against the narrator. I will say, I did enjoy the time I spent playing the game. I even felt bad for the narrator, as they addressed the scenario as a game. Everything about this experience was all a "game" that's replayed over and over again with different outcomes. In one of the location in the game, you can see the first half were your greeted with the design of the path that leads to the 2 doors you need to choose. Apparently right here in this moment, the designers went all out and made this game about player choice. This game is brilliant and I'm glad to have played it!