In class on Tuesday, we were told to bring a deck of cards and tell a story somehow with them.  This really got me thinking of how you could possibly tell a story with playing cards; after all, they’re just numbers and symbols.  However, after thinking about it, my group was able to come up with an entire story about a king and a queen who had a certain number of children who ended up dying, and the story’s components all somehow related to the images on the cards.  I thought this to be interesting because we were able to add meaning to something that didn’t seem like it truly meant anything. Although our stories were rather randomly generated and often quite strange, we created something interesting out of a mere object, and I found this to be symbolic of modern-day games in which people use symbolism and environmental images to tell stories.

After we performed the exercise, we played a little bit through the game Virginia.  Upon immediately watching the gameplay, I could tell it was very movie-esque.  Different games tell stories in different ways, and Virginia was definitely taking a less “choice-impacted” route. The beginning had credits saying it was a true story, and all of the people who worked on the game were listed behind beautiful landscapes and colorful screens accompanied by intro music.  We talked about what dramatizes a game, and the music and lighting definitely did this for Virginia, as did the random cutscenes and dreaming sequences.  The red lighting when the main character goes to show the lady her FBI badge before walking across stage gave us an unsettling feeling, as did the other random dream with a Buffalo being in the missing child, Lucas’s, room.  The fact that the game has no talking adds to this feeling – the creators want to create an environment in which the viewer experiences what is happening and can interpret it for themself. Voice acting often has a strong impact, like in the animated Uno video, but a lack of voice also has a very strong impact.  We can focus better on what’s happening for ourselves and listen to every little sound queue like the music. It adds more of an unsettling feeling, almost like we ourselves are watching everything unfold and don’t quite get a say in what happens.

Virginia.  505 Games, 2016.