unforum

[noideaforausername]

You probably get this a lot

[Nightmare Tony]

Ist: get this one book: THIS IS NOT A GAME by Dave Szulborski.
2ns study everything in here. Get the feel for the genre. A game is simply more than websites and puzzles. Meaning and context do apply.

If you want to talk, my AIM name is hte same as my user name here.
many resources and many people with advice or an opinion....

[MageSteff]

[colin]

I'm going to suggest something that's more than likely different to what everyone else will tell you.

Focus on the marks.

Don't worry about the finer points of interactive narrative being worked into your game. Don't worry about multiple story arcs told from multiple perspectives. Put all that into your dissertation / thesis.

I would focus on creating website(s) that look real, but have that hidden side (passworded directory etc.). I would create a static trail that leads the player through a story (and puzzles). Keep it fairly linear, use email auto-responders and the like. The benefits of this are that you don't have to spend hours monitoring the game as it runs and after your presentation the audience can go and play through the trail.

You can still have story, puzzles and interaction* you just won't have interactivity*.

If you wanted to be fancy you could have the closing scene of your story happen during your presentation... of course then the audience will know how the story ends, which segways perfectly into talking about non-linear story telling which is one things ARGs are great for (although I'm not advising it for your trail )

*I'm defining interaction as cause/effect action /reaction and interactivity as a dynamic response Ie. Live chat

[noideaforausername]

cheers guys:)

i hung around here during Ilovebees (absolutely loved the way that narrative was built up and painstakingly extracted, no hope in hell of doing something like that). Colin, yeah, i like the sound of what you're saying. I think it's probably too late in the day, for someone without the resources, to pull off something that's dynamic and on an epic scale. But it would be pretty neat to have a short narrative that leads across a number of sites, (maybe with stuff that took the game into real-world environments too, got a decent city and even a building with it's own OS to work with). Looks like i've got some more discussion to have with my tutor, as well as some kind of a 'screenplay' to come up with.
again, thanks for the help, it's given me something to think about:)

[MageSteff]

[noideaforausername]

haha, see, when i started this year at uni, i was thinking "yeah, for my project, i want to do some creative writing", like, i wanted to turn out a novel or some kind of story or other. I've not done any creative writing in a few years (always had ideas for things, never written them down), so this might be a good chance to finally get some done:)