For those of you who don’t know, I did write one other computer game in the past, The Missions of Starship Reliant (aka, Missions of the Reliant). I had always wanted to write and release a game throughout my childhood, but all I knew back in the 80s was BASIC, and that never got me very far. And so, at one point in my mid-twenties, and being a Mac fan and all, I decided to pick up some books and learn Pascal. In 1994, amid great imaginary fanfare and to much fictitious critical acclaim, the first version of Missions was released in all of its $20 shareware glory. (The sequel, Missions II, was released in 1996, but it was really just an expansion of the original and not truly a sequel. It just sounded cool.)
Missions was based on the (really) old ASCII Star Trek games that once graced [More...]
Musings
Question: Can high drama be produced from a wide-open simulation?
Creating a game that tells a story is one thing. Creating a game that tells a dramatic, moving story is quite another.
Can you really get a dramatic, moving experience from a game that is not tightly scripted or linear? Can high drama truly emerge from an open, unbounded simulation-style game?
Everyday life is a wide-open sandbox. Clearly, there is high drama in real life. But, as mentioned a while back on rec.arts.int-fiction, “Most people’s lives are not filled with high drama all the time. Some events will be dramatic, but creating a dramatic story from those requires editing out all the mundane parts.” (greg)
That editing, in game terms, is what I imagine is the scripting, restriction, or forcing of linearity onto the game narrative.
Isn’t high drama really the product of the manipulation of people’s emotions through selective [More...]