Slay the Dragon. Robert Denton Bryant

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СКАЧАТЬ story).

      Don’t leave any space blank!

      The simplest method is to complete a matrix like this one:

SPACE	STORY CONTENT
1.
2.
3.
4.
etc.

      We have done this in class many times. We want storytellers to begin to use board games as a way of telling their stories. One student did an “extreme sports survival” game about a trip to climb Mount Everest. Five players climbed a mountain with gear and rations and were caught in a snowstorm and trapped. Will they make it? Play the game and find out. Each space brought you deeper into the world. The language and tone immersed the player in the world of extreme mountain climbing. It was complex but simple. You want to have a clear goal.

      Remember, don’t change the rules, or redesign the game board. You’re writing on top of a game that has already been designed (professional game writers have to do this all the time). Save your urge to design gameplay for the next exercise.

       2 TURN YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE INTO A BOARD GAME

      This exercise is the opposite of the first one. Now you will focus on creating gameplay to reflect an existing story. Try it with your favorite classic movie. Why classic? Because chances are that your favorite recent movie is already a board game (and no fair turning Battleship or Clue back into board games).

      Choose a classic film that falls outside the action/adventure genre: Citizen Kane, Silence of the Lambs, When Harry Met Sally, Animal House, Dr. Strangelove, Dirty Dancing, The Breakfast Club … How would you make such a movie into a board game? You can make it any type of game you want, but the simpler the better. We are not looking for you to make 3D printed character pieces with an elaborately designed game board.

       DESIGN THE GAME BOARD

      1. Create a simple board game using a game template. You can use the board game above or do an Internet search for “Board Game Templates” if you want more examples.

      2. Choose a board. You now begin to see a structure. Do all this in pencil. Very rudimentary.

      3. Write down your ideas. How do you see the game being played out? What is the objective of the game?

      4. What are the mechanics? Dice? How many? Are there cards that need to be created and drawn?

      5. How many players can play at one time? Is the game competitive or cooperative?

       THE STORY OF THE GAME

      1. How do the beats (plot points, story events) in the movie lead to the end of the game? Think of the pivotal scenes in the movie you have chosen. How can they be represented on the game board?

      2. Do you need cards or branching paths to represent turning points in the story? How can you represent progress and setbacks? Does a setback put you back three spaces? Six? It’s up to you.

      3. Who are your characters? Let’s say it’s a hero vs. villain game. Will you have the good guy start in one direction around the board while the bad guy starts moving in the other direction? If they land on the same space, will they fight? How do they fight? Do they roll dice? What are the results of that fight?

       TEST THE GAME

      1. Write down the rules.

      2. Play the game. Test it. Have friends play it and watch them play. Record your observations in your Game Journal

      3. Rewrite the rules.

      4. Have more friends play it. Record more observations.

       REFINE THE GAME

      1. Redo and refine the artwork.

      2. Rewrite the game rules and add a story introduction.

      3. Rewrite the cards. Do they stay in a character’s voice?

      Think about how you can keep the spirit and the tone of the original movie. Does the voice you use on the cards match the voice of the movie? For example, if the game is Silence of the Lambs, do the cards read as if they were written by Hannibal Lecter? By Agent Clarice Starling? By Buffalo Bill?

      12 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/08/25/amazon-pounces-on-twitch-after-google-balks-due-to-antitrust-concerns/

      13 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meier_on_how_to_see_games_as_sets_of_interesting_decisions.php

      14 Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Ebook. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, loc 400.

      15 Anthropy, Anna. 2012. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Ebook. 1st ed. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press., Loc. 939.

      16 The Making of “The Last of Us” - Part 1: A Cop, A Mute Girl and Mankind, http://youtu.be/Fbpvzq-pfjc, retrieved January 20, 2015.

      17 http://narrativedesign.org/about/

      CHAPTER 02

      DO GAMES NEED STORIES?

      “Let us now discuss the proper structure of the Plot, since this is the first and most important thing …” Aristotle. Poetics.

      ARISTOTLE IS CONSIDERED to be the first story guru. He knew the importance of story structure to both the comprehension and enjoyment of the story, play, or poem. In Poetics he analyzed the method of creating plays and poems—the dominant storytelling forms of pre-Christian Greece—charting the role of the protagonist (main character) as his or her story unfolds in front of an audience. Aristotle probably never imagined a world where the audience of a play might become either the protagonists or the coauthors of the play. Yet this is what happens in video games and other forms of interactive storytelling.

STORY MATTERS

      At this point, let’s address and discard one of the stalest canards in game development: Stories don’t matter to games. Story, narrative, setting, and world are as crucial to a video game as gameplay, character design, art direction, sound effects, or music. Try to imagine playing a game with no gameplay, character design, art direction, sound effects, or music. What would that be? Digital tic-tac-toe? Would you enjoy it? Would you play for very long? Would you tell your friends about it? As lifelong writers, we get a little impatient when we hear someone declare firmly that “games are not a storytelling medium.”

      Of course games can be a storytelling medium, just as books can be a storytelling medium. The fact that some books are phone directories doesn’t negate The Road, On The Road, or Oryx and Crake. We game creators should stop thinking of our medium as being one monolithic, homogenous whole. We should СКАЧАТЬ