jesseb
|
|
« on: September 16, 2014, 01:50:11 PM » |
|
I'm thinking about putting together a storytelling game jam and wanted to gauge interest before I do. The idea would be for participants to make games whose mechanics are specifically focused on story, as opposed to like an FPS or RPG with heavy story elements.
As for assigning a theme, I have two ideas. 1.) Instead of having a broad theme for all players, I would assign each participant a random article on wikipedia from which they have to base their story or story mechanic. I would moderate when necessary just to make sure we don't end up with a bunch of articles on obscure chemical compounds or something (though that could be interesting too!) 2.) I'd provide a vague story structure or archetype, like a.) boy meets girl, b.) boy and girl fall in love, c.) girl kills boy, and each participant would make a story game following that pattern.
I think storytelling through games has a lot of potential and has only just begun to be explored in any interesting way, so the over-arching goal of the jam is to allow gamedevs interested in storytelling an opportunity to experiment with new techniques and forms.
To give you an idea of what I mean, here's a short list of games I consider "storytelling games" (there's probably a better term I could use...):
Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, To The Moon - In these games, the player has no substantial impact on the narrative. It is basically about exploring a pre-existing narrative and being immersed in the world as the story unfolds.
The Stanley Parable - Basically a very complex Choose Your Own Adventure game. In this game the central mechanic IS choosing which story path to follow. Even though I knew that the story paths were pre-written, the way its built made me feel very much like an active participant. (A very, very inspiring game if you haven't played it...)
Sleep Is Death - a two-player co-op story creation game in which one player is the "Game Master", having control of the game world and all NPCs, and the other player is the "Player". The game is really more like improv, in that the point is the spontaneous creation of a story.
I'm also specifically not wanting to include Interactive Fiction, just because I feel like IF is already kind of its own thing.
So yah, sorry for the long post... I imagine it'd be a 48 hour jam, though maybe 7 days would be more fitting, but I don't have any details, dates, or anything else figured out yet. First I wanted to see if this is at all interesting to other people. Also, let me know if there is already a jam or gamedev community like this! I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.
|