Finding the Narrative Heartbeat

It’s #notGDC week! #notGDC is a free online game development conference that runs alongside GDC. This year, I decided to put together a talk on a subject that’s pretty much constantly on my mind, but often flies under the radar–narrative sequencing.

“We’ve put an explosive charge in your head. Does that sound familiar?”

We open on a close-up of Ethan Hunt, our once-intrepid hero. We have no idea where he is, but he’s bloodied, incapacitated, and apparently, Philip Seymour Hoffman has put a bomb in his head.

“I’m going to count to ten,” says Hoffman as he draws a gun. “You’re going to tell me where the Rabbit’s Foot is, or she dies.”

Okay, skipping over the fact that he’s threatening to fridge one of Mission Impossible III’s only women, from a narrative standpoint it’s a fantastic place to start a story. Just off like a rocket from the very first shot.

Immediately, though, the story runs into a problem: action and emotion must escalate. If this is this starting point, the narrative is going to need a ton of vertical room to go absolutely bonkers. If we start with explosive head-charges and only 10 seconds to save the world, we better have fist-fights on the moon before the end of act 1, and punch God in the face by act 3.

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Press Any Key to Continue

One of my favourite games of 2015 has been DONTNOD’s Life is Strange. It’s a brilliant indie-film-coming-of-age-time-travel-story about a girl who’s recently returned to her home town and struggling to repair past friendships. Oh, and try to prevent the town from being destroyed by a crazy magical tornado, a disaster she might be able to avert by manipulating time.

No one would be able to claim that it’s a flawless game, but it does so much stunningly right that it’s going to be on my mind for a long time. At some point, I might need to write about how the gameplay works to mirror the emotions of the main character–Max–with the emotions of the player. That’s some fantastic stuff. But right now, there’s one thing that I was to focus on: pacing.

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Cold Boot

This was originally published on Medium back in February, 2015

I grew up in one of the most incredible eras. The timing was really impeccable. I was born the same year the Macintosh was released. The proliferation of personal computers is something I witnessed first-hand. I remember monitors that could show only orange, followed by CGA (3 colours), EGA (16 colours), and VGA (256 colours, which was nothing short of a revelation). It was a complicated, new, and occasionally scary world.

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Walmart, 1993

In 1993, I purchased a shovelware CD from Walmart. Now, in 2015, everything about that sentence seems odd.

I would have been 9 years old at the time. Already a nerd. But I’m glad that 9-year-old me thought to buy this particular CD, because by doing so I may have accidentally saved a bit of gaming history.

One of the things I’d like to do on this blog is crawl through the CD, directory by directory, and report on my findings. A lot of it is stuff you’ve probably seen before, but there’s just enough weirdness on this CD that some of these games might never have been documented before.

But first: what the hell is shovelware

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Cheating death

Originally written for the zine Heart Container

Imagine you’re at a play–live theatre with an ensemble cast. The lights are dim, the set is immaculate, and the performances are impassioned and engaging.

And then, half an hour in, one of the actors flubs their line.

Instead of the other actors taking it in stride, everything stops. The stage goes dark, and you hear the director yell from offstage that they’re going to try it again from the top.

But it happens again, this time only ten minutes in. They restart again. And again.

It’s a pretty horrible way to tell a story.*

The sting of the Game Over screen is, often, no less awful, and for exactly the same reasons.

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