Assignment: Thematic / Story Game

Overview & Design Goals

Working in small groups, students will design an original game that uses particular interactive narrative techniques to tells a particular story.

Design goal: engage with techniques of interactive and systems-based storytelling. A main focus of this project is to explore the ways that games can tell stories. While there are many ways for games to signify narrative, each group will be working within a particular kind of narrative game format that will help determine the kinds of interactive and systemic storytelling techniques your group might use. Does your design deeply explore games and storytelling? Can you employ ways of telling stories that could only happen in games?

Design goal: express aspects of the story you were given through your game’s player experience. Your group will also be given a narrative constraint in the form of a short story. Your goal is to express part or all of this story within your game experience. Beyond just retelling the facts of the story, can your design also engage with the mood and tone or the themes and ideas of the story? As you develop the narrative elements of your design, put particular emphasis on details – such as the actual writing in the game materials or the player rules. Can you weave a compelling narrative experience that does justice to your original story constraint?

Process & Constraints

Each group will be working from the following constraints:

• a gameplay format that will help determine the overall shape of the game design
• a short story that provides the narrative content for your game design
• your game can be designed for a single player (but more than one player is fine too)
• it does not need to be a traditional game with winning and losing and can instead be more of an interactive narrative experience without a quantifiable outcome (but traditional games are fine too)

PROTIP: Do we have to tell the entire story we were given? Definitely not! You are welcome to focus on particular aspects of the story – perhaps a single moment or scene, or one of the characters, or some other element from the story world. You might also have to invent story content to help flesh out aspects of your game. Your design can faithfully re-tell the story as it was originally written, but you can also respond critically to the story, perhaps changing the ending or adjusting identities of characters.

Concept development

Here is the brainstorming process we would like you try out for this assignment. It is based on the idea of CREATIVE GOALS (similar to “Design Pillars”) that are often used to focus the overall direction of a concept as it is being designed. Before you meet for the first time: Read your story and think about your chosen format. Come up with THREE CREATIVE GOALS that you think your project should strive for. A creative goal can be narrative (tell a moving story about a misguided character) or structural (a short narrative game that’s different every time it is played) or experiential (create a feeling of growing terror) or some combo (the players make a series of difficult moral choices). When your group meets for the first time: Have a common document (on-line spreadsheet, MIRO board, etc) everyone can see and access.

(Group Only) Follow these steps:

1. One by one, have each team member post one of their creative goals to the doc. Explain it briefly.
2. Then each team member posts and explains their second goal. And then the third goal. If any goals are really similar, feel free to clump them together.
3. In any order, each team member presents a RAW DESIGN IDEA that might meet one or more goals that other people posted. Type a summary of the idea into the document, next to the creative goal that it addresses. A “raw design idea” is not a complete idea for a game, but an off-the-cuff notion for how to address a goal. For example, “a deck of cards with a monster at the bottom” might be a design idea for how to create a feeling of growing terror.
4. Go around again and have each team member add another raw design idea. You can add ideas onto ideas, expanding and refining them. But each team member only adds one idea at a time in sequence, so that everyone is adding the same number of ideas.
5. When you feel like there is a good critical mass of ideas, take a moment to look it over. First, try and reduce the number of creative goals to somewhere between 3 and 5. Focus on the goals that generated more ideas. Combine goals if it helps, but end up with 3-5 creative goals that the group can agree should be the driving creative vision for the design.
6. Then, take a look at the design ideas. Is there a prototype direction that is emerging out of them? Feel free to move them around and combine them into something that looks like it could be a start of a first prototype draft.

One rule to follow during this process: Once a creative goal or design is posted, IT BELONGS TO THE GROUP. You are not permitted to refer to the author of who posted it (ie, don’t say “Naomi’s creative goal).

Research

Early in the process, your group should also investigate example games part of the gameplay format you desire. These games will provide lots of good ideas and mechanics you might use as you begin to develop your own game.

Deliverables

• A version of your game materials (whether digital or not) that is ready to play. If because of the particular format of your game you cannot make a playable version available to play, please consult with the instructor well in advance of the deadline.
• A single PDF file that contains:
  • the name of the game, a 1-sentence logline, and the designers’ names
  • a 50-100 word summary of what the game is
  • the complete rules for the game
  • documentation of the game, possibly including photos and PDFs of any materials
  • a 2-3 paragraph design statement that outlines the ideas behind the game – in other words, what your group thinks is interesting to point out about the game and its design