Esther and Stanley and Fate

Often we talk about narrative logic when we talk about stories. Does a thing hang together, make sense? Does it have plot holes? How shall we plug them? How can we make it all correct? The metaphor suggests an orderly

Blizzard and Bioware's MMOs: Telling Stories From Opposite Directions

There’s a lot of presumption out there that MMORPGs can’t or don’t tell stories like their single-player counterparts. Me, I think it’s nonsense. Maybe that was true in the past. It isn’t now.

In fact, I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve evolved from oldschool monster-clubbing. Somehow, some way, MMOs started telling stories. Final Fantasy XI has character-focused missions bound together into a grand narrative, Age of Conan has its early-game switches between single-player and multiplayer, and Guild Wars has its hub-and-instance structure. Dungeons and Dragons Online actually has a narrator. Storytelling’s gotten big, and storytelling choices has become key to differentiation within the genre.

Even World of Warcraft (WoW) has evolved into a story-focused game.

After pressing start: Unraveling Chrono Cross' chronological mysteries

Chrono Cross is the Led Zeppelin of video games. When it first arrived on scene, it was one of the highest rated games ever: I remember reading countless perfect score reviews, psyching myself up for launch. Of course, the hype

Why Blizzard's surrogate ruins Diablo 3

Video games, at heart, are about us. We may be someone else, but we’ll always be ourselves, too. Whether that someone is Gordon Freeman, physicist and monster-killer, or Kratos, menacing god of punching dudes with chains, or Lara Croft, we’re

Waiting to Respawn: Don't Take The Story Out of Multiplayer

Last week, Bitmob staff writer Rus McLaughlin pondered the usefulness of narrative elements in multiplayer modes in his piece “Multiplayer Doesn’t Need A Narrative.” You can probably guess his stance from the title. McLaughlin admits that certain games have incorporated

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

The Grind: An MMORPG Tragedy

This is a story about a girl. No, not in the way you’re thinking. Not really, anyway. I’m not talking about the girl next door or the redhead behind the counter at the coffee shop.  The girl this story is

The Paragon Homunculus in ME

Over the course of seven days I fell in and out of love, only to find it again in the arms of another.  I stopped a genocide, only to cause two others; I talked people off ledges, helped mend broken

How You Got Videogames Wrong: …And film…and music…and literature…etc.

Pissing you off in installments, the monthly series “How You Got Videogames Wrong” delves beyond appearances into the slimy interior of The God’s Truth (about videogames). This month we’ll be looking at “Show, don’t tell”—and how it might not mean

The Dear Esther Interlard

You are on a macadam jetty — ostensibly shipwrecked — looking out over a briny shoreline that snakes its way out into the distance before disappearing behind a limestone cliff face. Even further stands a radio tower on which a