Monday, December 1, 2014

PW Aspect of the MQP

I've been slacking too much on the Professional Writing portion of my MQP and it's starting to catch up to me. The next few weeks, I'm going to have to really bust my hump in order to get it to where it should be by the end of B term.

That being said, however, it is still part of the MQP and I believe its completion will help me write a better story that engages the player on a deeper level than it would otherwise.

My PW aspect is essentially a study dedicated to determining how to create an emotional connection between the player and the narrative within the framing of a strategy game. While there have been numerous studies on action games and RPGs in terms of emotional affect, the field of research within strategy games is mainly barren. Some would argue that strategy games, by their natural inclination to openness and appeals to logic as opposed to emotion, can't support complex and rich narratives, but I believe that to be false. Especially since I've been on the receiving end of games for a long time and have encountered plenty of strategy games able to create interesting stories and narratives.

By answering this question of how to create emotional connection between player and narrative, I believe the MQP will be that much more enjoyable for it. For the time being then, I think I will put my primary focus on successfully developing the methodology and literature review so that I can be a more effective storywriter in terms of creating engaging and interesting situations for the player, which will help our entire project as a whole in the long run.

1 comment:

  1. Soren Johnson did a talk that might help:

    http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012750/Theme-is-Not

    Not sure if that's a video or just slides. Try to find the video.

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