Games Stories

Yep, its time we got into some more readings here. This time these readings go into detail about the importance of stories in games. Our first reading today is Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Heroes Journey by Bob Bates. One particularly intriguing point he addressed in the reading was the importance of myths. You see, Bob brought up the point that the myths we have created are very important in that we base our values of society on these myths: these myths also teach us about who we are and how we should behave on top of that. Having read through his points regarding this I can't even argue he is wrong: I was once told how the the perspective of a story is told through the eyes of someone who perceives themselves as the hero (regardless if their intentions or actions are remotely altruistic) and we see their story through their mindset. He further mentions our myths came from our ancestors, ancestors who had survived the trials of the ancient periods and shared their parables to the others (Such as the Good Samaritan). Its interesting that he tells us that storytelling is used to make sense of our world and is wired into our brains.

Following this, he goes into detail about "The Heroes Journey" and sets out the main components of the story. I enjoyed that he says players choose types of games that reaffirm their own personal myths, so people could choose violent games to feel in control of situations and be brave. Games like Tetris would appeal to players to bring order out of chaos. These were the points I found most interesting from this article.
In  What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story the writer talks about the importance of story in games in order to sell more of them to a wider audience. This point I like. I found interesting how important conflict is in stories and how much can be learned from studying how classical stories worked. To illustrate his point, he chose the example of Halo a game which has a three act structure and I found this a good example.
Comparing Storytelling in Games and Literature raised some interesting ideas, the author talks about how branching narratives work really well for games stories. This is because the players actions can unlock different versions of the story depending on the choices they make. We studied branching narratives last year and not realized how helpful they would be for writing game stories.

 Halo is a game that tells a story in a classic 3 act form

 A story with hero based on Greek mythology

 Zelda is a game best known for being based on legends and stories. This is a novelization of one such popular tale.