Comments on Pixel Poppers: Play Me A Story, Part Two: What Makes A Metanarrat...

By the way, that's a strange assertion, Anonymous....

2009-12-16T22:00:43.637-08:00

By the way, that's a strange assertion, Anonymous. I'll just speak from my own experience to say that I don't find the emotional dimension of story elements or the accompanying game decisions to be "meaningless." I find them very valuable and am often frustrated when a game has significant dissonance between playing for emotional value and playing for mechanical advancement and effectiveness. And I have certainly "played characters" in games in the sense of investing emotionally in the fiction and identifying to some degree with the character's human-ness.

It does happen RARELY. But I think it could happen with greater frequency and potency if games more deeply explored Doctor Professor's four qualities of choice.

I read this and the previous article and I was ins...

2009-12-16T21:53:54.024-08:00

I read this and the previous article and I was inspired. What a smart and beautiful enumeration of the qualities of truly collaborative fiction!

I was so struck by how many times I've been deprived of one or more of those qualities, whether in a computer game or in tabletop roleplaying, that I blogged about it myself:

http:/storybythethroat.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/free-affirmed-expressive-consequential/

Thanks for the insight!

Peace,
-Joel

"Clearly this choice isn't forced, exactly, but it...

2009-12-02T17:05:44.415-08:00

"Clearly this choice isn't forced, exactly, but it is made under some duress. It becomes not about faith, not about brotherhood, not about Lucas either shutting down Markus's awkward gesture or letting him feel like he has helped in one of the only ways he knows how. It's about getting a 1-Up. The choice has been replaced with a puzzle with a correct answer, no freer than a question on a multiple-choice test."

I would contend that all game choices are in fact the same. Ultimately there are only two kinds of choice in any game, the meaningful one and the meaningless one.

A meaningful choice is a choice that advances the player mechanically. A meaningless choice is, basically everything else.

All games involve some meaningful choices but not all games involve meaningless ones. It ultimately comes down to a choice to gain a 1-up, or a choice to dick around playing the game of dialog or character customisation or a hundred other boredom diversions.

That's why metanarrative doesn't really exist. For it to work, players would have to be deriving significant personal value from meaningless choices. But the don't. Players don't really play characters in videogames any more than they do when playing Chess.