Narrative_Design

W E L C O M E ! !

So excited to welcome you all back. Today, we’ll meet as a group to…

• Say hello! (Who are you? How have you been? What are you excited/nervous about this semester?)
• Discuss this class and set expectations (Syllabus review)
• Plan for our next meeting
• What do we design? “The Door Problem” by Liz England
• Games are complex storytelling devices. Drunk cats in Dwarf Fortress (first 4 minutes)
• Our imaginations are complex storytelling devices. Bronzemurder: A Dwarf Fortress Tale by Tim Denee

What’s this class?

We’ll go over the syllabus together, which will hopefully be informative, but also hopefully the most boring thing we do this semester.

Homework

Install the Inky editor

Install the Inky editor to your laptop before class next week. You can find Mac and PC downloads here.

Purchase Textbook

Please order a copy of Wonderbook by next week. Amazon currently has it new for $24 and AbeBooks has a few used copies for around $12. There will be reading assignments periodically throughout the semester.

Can’t purchase a copy for any reason?

• We’ll also keep a copy in the Game Lab (D220)
• Decker Library should be putting their copy on reserve for us by next week.

Play Interactive Fiction samples

We’ll begin talking about a specific genre of narrative game next week called Interactive Fiction, focusing on a selection of historical and contemporary examples. Here are a couple to get us started with.

Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)

Play William Crowther’s seminal Interactive Fiction (IF) game, Colossal Cave Adventure. There is an online port of the game which you can play here.

You do not need to play to completion, but please play for at least 1 hour.

Also, the puzzles in this game can be… frustrating. Don’t get too wrapped up in them unless that’s really something you enjoy. In fact, here’s a walkthrough of the game (you can find others online too). This is not a challenge to your gamer cred.

Play Galatea (2000)

Play Emily Short’s Galatea.

You do not need to play to completion, but please play for at least 1 hour.

Play With Those We Love Alive

With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine

A moving vignette of life in a mundane and monstrous world in which players are invited to draw sigils upon their own bodies.

Have a pen/,marker (and paper if you don’t want to draw on your body)

You do not need to play to completion, but please play for at least 1 hour.

If you need help with these games…

Feeling stuck? Parser games such as the first two games can be a little confusing at first. Here is a handy IF-for-beginners visual guide by Andrew Plotkin and Leah Albaugh that may help.

Now what??

Take notes. What did you like? Dislike? Something that caused a reaction in you? Something you didn’t understand? Favorite moments?

Come to class next week with a an open-ended discussion question related to each of the games you played.

Consider joining the MICA Game Design Discord (if you aren’t already there).

• Here’s the invitation link.
• If you are new to the server: You will need to visit the #welcome-and-rules channel to view the code of conduct and click the star emote to unlock the rest of the server.
• Make sure your server nickname is representative of your name in this class (and presumably outside of this class!)
• Here’s a link if you don’t know how: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames

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