The Players Realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming edited by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith

Section 2: Discourse and Ideology
The Green Berets to America's Army: Video games as a vehicle for political propaganda.

• Special forces embodies many characteristics typically associated with the genre, its storyline is unique: players assume the role of Islamic militants repelling an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Designed by Hezbollah, a militant Shia group widely viewed as a terrorist organization, special forces is intended to attract new recruits while bolstering support for the fight against occupation. Within a few month of its release, more than 10000 copies had been distributed in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

• Developed for the U.S army by the Modeling, Simulation and Virtual Environments Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, America's Army deliberately taps into immersive game context in the hopes of recruiting young americans into the Army. With more than 1.5million copies downloaded over a six month period.

• Both games are consciously designed to foster support for the military objectives of their creators, while recruiting youth to pick up arms in pursuit of their goals. By many measures, both titles could be considered propaganda. However, the development teams responsible for these games classify their handiwork as educational entertainment.

• "Compelling worlds created by game designers have the potential to shape attitudes in dangerous ways. Goebbels was so frightening because he had a pretty good grip on how to uses modern media for propaganda purposes. Right now, we're all too dumb to figure it out. Someday, we'll have our interactive Goebbels." Chris Crawford

These two games are both incredibly obvious examples of games being used as propaganda. These games really interest me as they show how a game can be used to make people think about a certain game or topic, and as is the case with these games, have an affect on the audience, however this games do it through complete obviousness and not through careful metaphor. In the next post I will continue to follow the book, and show how it expands on the idea of propaganda and how persuasion is created in videogames.

Detailing

With a rough outline of the narrative, I now need to focus on adding detail to the outline so that I can start to construct a coherent world for the narrative to take place. I need to look at:

• The Four Brothers: who are they? why are they the protagonist? what is their purpose? physical description? history?
• The Clans? How many? Who are they? Are the clans related? What's the similarities and differences between the clans? Social ranks? How are the clans run? Where do they live?
• The world: Description of the world? How does the environment affect day to day life?
• The enemies: Who are they? Why is there conflict? what is their relationship to the dwarves? where did they come from?
• The King / Father:Who is he? what is he like? His role in society? His feelings towards his people? His feelings towards the heros?
• Story: How will all the events link together? How will I represent this in the gameplay?

Starting to plot out the story

• You play as the four sons of the current king.
• The king is picked from the strongest and most popular clan.
• The last five kings have all been from the current kings clan.
• When the king first came to the throne, times were good, and the king was loved by everyone. However times have changed and the goblins have started daily raid and have already taken one territory.
• Due to the constant attacks the king has been forced into making hard decisions that have affected all the classes but mainly the poor.
• Unlike most princes and nobles, the four princes live amongst their people and are loved by all in their clan. However, this is not the same in all clans. Most clans follow a strict social code in which there is a clear divide between the upper and lower classed.
• The game focuses on the theme of growing up. Now that the king is under a lot of pressure it is up to the four brothers to work together in an effort to do all the kings tasks around the four territories.
• The game also focuses on your relationship with your father. Some of the quests he sends you on will negatively affect a lot of the lower class. Choosing to do the task will improve your relationship with your father but often negatively affect your relationship with the people. However not doing the task will negatively affect your relationship with your father but improve your standing with the lower classes.
• Eventually you will have reunited all four territories to create an army. The size of this army as well as its quality are affected by the decisions you've made throughout the game.
• The game will use in game decisions.

This is just the basic outline of the narrative, I now need to work through this outline to add more detail, and to fix anything that causes the coherence to be destroyed. I also need to start thinking about the new game mechanics I will be adding and how they will work.

Game Writing; Narrative skills for videogames edited by Chris Bateman

"In static media, inconsistencies can be hidden from the audience to a certain degree, but in a dynamic medium such as nonlinear games, the player has more time and capability to explore the narrative space - inconsistencies are not only at risk of being uncovered, they can begin to unravel the entire tapestry of the story.

Players will have a variety of different responses to inconsistencies - a few will devise their own mental models to eliminate them, but many will become confused or annoyed. Either way, the player's attention is diverted from play, which cannot be beneficial.

Internal consistency must apply to every character, every line of dialogue, and every branching story path the player encounters. This means game writers must be especially careful with recombinant branches, as the game state can become ambiguous, leading to dialogue that risks being inaccurate or in the worst cases wholly inappropriate."

This passage highlights the importance of having a coherent world, so that the players attention is not diverted from play and they are not removed from the 'magic circle' of play. This will be incredibly important for me to think about when creating my story, as this will allow me to produce a much deeper story that actually makes the audience think.

Game Writing; Narrative skills for videogames edited by Chris Bateman

"Writing an effective nonlinear game story is a challenge because story and game are essentially incompatible. Their end goal is similar - each seeks to create an unpredictable, yet highly satisfying entertainment experience - but to achieve it, they rely on opposite constraints. The power of a story comes from its structure. The power of a game comes from its freedom."

This passage highlights the importance of the balance needed between story and gameplay. If the game is too story driven the audience will feel like they are not achieving much and the game will begin to feel to linear, however if the game is too gameplay driven it can often become hard to understand the flow of the game.

Game Writing; Narrative skills for videogames edited by Chris Bateman

"No matter how wonderful a writers exposition of dwarven tiddlywinks rituals might be (unless there's a key element of gameplay that hinges on a dwarf literally losing his marbles), it should generally be saved for the promotional materials, tie-in novels, or projects that are personal to the writer. Many players wont want to hear it.

As with every rule, there are exceptions. Certain adventure games, for example, have escaped criticism for their verbosity. Because the classic adventure is in many ways closely tied to the novel in terms of the narrative form employed, it is perhaps more acceptable for these games to indulge in additional exposition - especially if it can be organized so that the players can explore it at their leisure. Being able to find a book in the library on dwarven tiddlywinks is a different proposition from forcing the player to listen to a character drone on about the subject."

This is an important point to remember when it comes to crafting my own narrative and story. I want my world to be rich and colourful, and to be completely coherent however, I don't want to bore the audience with endless cutscenes of backstory, but rather let the player learn about and experience it through playing the game. This will not only make the world seem more interesting but make the story a much more personal experience.

Next Step

Now that I've started to create some game mechanics from my player experience goals I will now be able to start crafting a story around them. I need to do some deeper research into creating a coherent world. By having a strong coherent world I'll be able to create a rich story in which to get across my ideas and deeper meaning.