You may choose to discuss the nature of narrative in any other emerging media if gaming is not interesting to you.
Here are a few games suggested by Cassidy Aquilino-Berg from last year's class:
Here are some games that are free and accessible online or downloaded I thought would be appropriate for this class and the way you are approaching games:
A 5 minute game about life.
Spectre is a recombinant narrative platformer, a game that tells the story of an individual's life. The landscape before you is not a physical world, but 73 years' worth of Joseph's memory: moments of joy and fear, light and darkness. As you navigate through his specific recollections, similarly themed events will glow bright. If you succeed in these moments of play and follow a glowing path, you will find a theme uniting his experience, and uncover a little more of his fading memory. If not, your nightly story will end in confusion.With over a hundred memories linked to fifty-two different ending themes, there are many possible narratives to discover in Spectre. Each session of play represents one fifteen-minute summary of Joseph Wheeler's past, one piece of a life-long puzzle. Different stories will highlight different facets of his experience and personality, leaving the player with a compelling, if never entirely complete, impression of the man, his place in the world, and what he sees when he stares upwards into the endlessly falling snow.
Casual Gameplay Design Competition #9 — "Friends" But that was Yesterday... by Micheal Molinari
A personal journey about learning to move forward in life.
Casual Gameplay Design Competition #8 — "Sandbox" Together by Micheal Molinari
Fly to the depths of the ocean or to the ends of the galaxy, together. As long as you have each other, there's no limit to where you can go.
FaΓ§ade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a five year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective.You, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.
Closure by Tyler Glaiel
Closure is yet more proof that accessible browser games can be used to tell stories—memorable, expressive stories with layers of metaphysical depth. The exciting thing about Closure is that it's not much like anything you've played before; but the brilliant thing is that it functions perfectly well as a technically impressive puzzle game with dynamic background music and some tricky timing/jumping challenges, without anybody needing to worry about its meaning. It's a pretty onion, even if you don't peel it.
I made this. You play this. We are enemies. by Jason Nelson
"We Are Enemies" plays off the notion that game designers and players are at odds, and that games are about hardcore challenge. He short-circuits conventional challenge by allowing you infinite respawns, and then launches into a gleeful exploration of Web noise culture, with all the poignancy of a William Burroughs cut-up (which means as much as you want to make of it). The gameplay is simple but that's alright, this is an aesthetic adventure and not as mind-blowing as the first time around, but worth drumming up a few wry smiles. My favorite part was T. Boone Pickens holding a wad of bills.
Samorost 1 by Amantia
Samorost is an adventure game that is full of clicky puzzles and beautifully rendered scenes mixed with animations and various gadgetry.
Consult the syllabus for more ideas.
