Game narrative jam part 2 – A few extra pieces

Life gets in the way, especially when it involves things like graduation, conference planning, and dissertation writing. This post slipped from being a couple of  few weeks late to being more like a month late, but I'm going to leave the part that was written previously as is so I can at least get it posted.

We didn't even get into metanarrative or transmedia narrative, maybe next time. Image borrowed from and linked to kotaku.com. Prior to the work flow hurricane which is the AERA conference, I relayed the majority of ideas we played around with in a game narrative jam a couple weeks ago in this post. I'd promised this follow up post sooner, but you know how it goes with the backlog and what not. In this post I'll relay some odds and ends around played narrative conflict in games without a big narrative, some awesome ideas Laura and Ian are tossing around for a library science game, and offer a few thoughts for anyone interested in doing this sort of thing in the privacy of your own classroom, office, or home (for the power geeks among you). Find all this and . . . actually just all of that after the jump.

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Chapter 4, it's happening

Some attribution: http://www.wordle.net/ Images of Wordles are licensed Creative Commons License .

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Shamus Young handles the issue brilliantly

Since I get The Escapist in my feed reader, I always have the opportunity to brighten my day with Shamus Young's Stolen Pixels. He recently started a hilarious series in the aftermath of Ebert's "games will never be art" piece starring Max Payne. Obviously, this is an issue I'm close to having blogged about it here previously. Strip #191 featuring "Big Pete" Molyneux is particularly awesome. If you'd rather start with part 1 of the series, click here first.

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impressionist blog: AERA

exhausted blogging on the couch

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Game narrative jam part 1 - we had some ideas

Last Friday I was invited by Caro Williams to run a game narrative jam with the game design crew she started facilitating here in Madison a few months ago. Turn out was a little small probably owing to the fact that we're at the end of the semester and AERA is around the corner (getting back to work on my poster as soon as I finish up this post), so I had to augment the activity I had in mind. That said, I think we floated some really cool ideas in the conversation that ensued, and as I'd promised in proposing the session I'm re-posting those ideas here.

Even games as abstract as the Bit.Trip series have a core narrative conflict lurking around somewhere . . . not that we talked about those games at all, but I like this image anyway. Writing this post took longer than expected, so what you have here is part 1 (expect part 2 later this week after I've got a finished poster for AERA). Something about in-game moral systems and narratives of loss after the jump.

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