The Story Department - How, Not If: drama, video games and TV
Among my favorite regular website reads is
The Story Department. Started as a blog of well known Australian script editor Karel Segers, TSD has evolved into a rich repository of essays, articles, reviews and discussions about story, cinema and screenwriting with contributors and readers from all over the world. This month I have the honour of having a small article fetaured on TSD entitled
How, Not If: drama, video games and TV that sprang from a lengthy binge of near round the clock, weeks-long, game playing and TV drama series watching.
The intro is below and the link will take you straight to
The Story Department to read the whole thing.
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I play games like I once used to read novels. There exists a pile and as I finish each game (taking a number of weeks and occasionally months each) I move immediately onto the next, working my way through the continually replenishing stack.It seems significant that I would use the word Finish in regard to
games. As its the self-same word I would use for a book, it implies
certain things. Chief among these implications are notions of linear
Progression, Finality and Inevitability. For many game theorists these
three concept terms are somewhat of an anathema.
Games are supposed to be non-linear, open-systems rather than closed
ones, they are player-controlled and thus are distinct and apart from
cinema and literature. Similarly, by nature of being player-controlled
they are, in theory, without inevitability.
click here to visit TSD and read the rest of this article and many others dealing with narrative drama and screenwriting.
Posted at 06:59PM Mar 12, 2010
by Mike Jones in moving image theory |
