On Tuesday, we talked about Game Design as Narrative Architecture by Henry Jenkins and in fact, I get to experience some of the author’s concepts when we played The Beginner’s Guide , Half-Life 2, Firewatch and even on Thursday when we get to play the solo project games.

The author mentions that not all games have stories and I can see that in The Beginner’s Guide. In The Beginner’s Guide, the narrator talks about how most of Coda’s games have no stories in them, not to mention that they all seem to be unfinished. However, I do enjoy the game and the reason for that is because the narrator, Davey Wreden turns his relationship with Coda and all Coda’s games into a single work of art or game that has story in it. His relationship with Coda gives a lot of context to the game. Without it, Coda’s games have no stories in them, however it is good to note that they are still considered as games.

On the other hand, we also have games where the stories are huge parts of the games. For example, both Half-Life 2 and Firewatch use stories to appeal to our emotions or previous narrative experiences as Jenkins would describe it. I love how Firewatch uses flashbacks to give more backgrounds to the character you are playing. It gives this sense of solitude in the forest, showing that the character perhaps wants to be alone. Another example would be from today. I played this ladder-like board game that has a Pokemon theme in it. This is an example of evocative space in which as I play the game, all of my experiences related to Pokemon come back to me.

All of these are useful when it comes to prototyping or designing the game, which we talked about last week. When prototyping and designing a game, we should ask ourselves questions such as: Will there be a story in the game? Will it be the main part of it? Even in developing the story, we can use the concept we learnt from Mark Barrett’s speech. We should design the overall story in the beginning and make it more in depth and add more details as we progress.

Barrett, Mark. “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Rapid Prototypes!” GDC, YouTube, 6 September 2017.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, Electronic Book Review, July 10, 2004, .