Warren Spector on Narrative

I think Warren Spector is a very bright man, he so intelligent that I even get lost throughout a few of his wise words. What stood out to me in his first article “A Narrative Fallacy: It’s All about Aristotle”, is when we are creating games, we need to make sure that we have something to say. In other words, give the games that we are crafting a significant message that we would like the players to grasp or understand the bigger picture of the story world, its soapbox. In my opinion, the games that have such a deeper message always end up having a great story. I recently took a storytelling class called “Transmedia Storytelling”, I realized that many great stories come from those that have a greater meaning behind the bigger story, and it’s all because of the message that they were trying to convey throughout their storyline. I can agree with this; many of my personal favorite games are ones that give me a deeper connection with the choices I have to make and the big message of the story. Some examples of great game stories would be the “Ratchet and Clank” series, “Heavy Rain”, “Beyond: Two Souls”, “Until Dawn”, and the “Infamous” series as well. I know that most of these games are choice based, but they also give you more of an immersive gameplay experience through different choices that can be made. This also lets players get a feel for the environment surrounding them and adding their emotions to their gameplay experience, giving them a way cooler sense of decision making in a way where one can feel a part of that world/ story world.

Shifting onto Warren Spector’s second article “Another Narrative Fallacy: Games are About Choice”, give us as designers, the understanding of different types of choices a player can make during their gameplay experience and what kind of world the players are a part of. In Warren’s explanation; he talks about games that give out a world that has a black and white view of decision making, letting the players have one choice that is the “right” choice while the other is clearly the “wrong” choice (good vs evil decision making). I think that I can relate with games that have more “gray” choices in a game because it makes the players question every move they make, it also gives it more of an emotional realistic feel to the story world. For example, “The Wolf Among Us” followed the story of a detective called “Big B. Wolf” (also known as the big bad wolf) in a series of different crime solving decision making. Throughout Big B’s investigation; the player must go through a series of different decisions where technically a lot of the choices are neither the “right” nor the “wrong” choices, but does this make the player a good detective or a bad detective in the game? This was very frustrating for me, but at the same time it gave it more of a human feel in a weird way. I think because it had so many “gray” areas of choices, it made me question every decision/ move I would make (my boyfriend would make), but this also made us feel a great immersive experience as a hated detective througout the game, putting us in very cool mysterious fairytale world, awesome job Telltale Games!

Based on the comics "Fables"