Game Narrative Through the Detective Lens

The Game’s Afoot: Designing Sherlock Holmes

A videogame based on the Sherlock Holmes’ stories by Arthur Conan Doyle is an interesting design challenge, which commercial games have tackled only half-heartedly. This paper discusses this challenge by examining the game design strategies across pre-existing games, then proposes a new set of strategies that would help players become the dweller of 221B Baker Street. The design critique of the games focuses on the actions available to players to become a detective, and the aspects of the interactivity that invite the player to become Sherlock Holmes. The suggested design strategies to encourage detective work are based on prompts from the original stories, such as disguising oneself, doing chemical analyses, or turning the process of deduction into game mechanics.

Stanislavky’s System as a Game Design Method: A Case Study

The relationship between theatre and games has been repeatedly discussed (Laurel 1993; Murray 1997; Frasca 2004; El-Nasr 2007;Fernández-Vara 2009), but its possibilities have not been explored in enough depth. This paper goes beyond a theoretical proposal, and describes how Stanislavski’s acting method (1959) served as the inspiration to design a game based on the Spanish classical theatre play, La Dama Boba (The Foolish Lady). The result was a point-and-click adventure game developed with the eAdventure platform, (Torrente, del Blanco, Marchiori, Moreno-Ger, Fernandez-Manjon 2010) a tool to create educational games. The paper provides an overview of the most and least successful aspects of this design method, and how it helped transform a narrative, dramatic in this case, into a digital game.

Game Spaces Speak Volumes: Indexical Storytelling

In the problematic exploration of the narrative potential of videogames, one of the clearest aspects that bridge stories and games is space. This paper examines the different devices that videogames have used to incorporate stories through spatial design and what is known as environmental storytelling, focusing on the design elements that make the story directly relevant to gameplay beyond world-building and backstory exposition. These design-related elements are accounted for with the term indexical storytelling. As a refinement of the concept of environmental storytelling, indexical storytelling is a productive game design device, since reading the space of the game and learning about the events that have taken place in it are required to traverse the game successfully. Storytelling becomes a game of story-building, since the player has to piece together the story, or construct a story of her own interaction in the world by leaving a trace.

Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis

The Game Ontology Project (GOP) is creating a framework for describing, analyzing and studying games, by defining a hierarchy of concepts abstracted from an analysis of many specific games. GOP borrows concepts and methods from prototype theory as well as grounded theory to achieve a framework that is always growing and changing as new games are analyzed or particular research questions are explored. The top level of the ontology (interface, rules, goals, entities, and entity manipulation) is described as well as a particular ontological entry. Finally, by engaging in three short discussions centered on relevant games studies research questions, the ontology’s utility is demonstrated.

Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance

Performance studies deals with human action in context, as well as the process of making meaning between the performers and the audience. This paper presents a framework to study videogames as a performative medium, applying terms from performance studies to videogames both as software and as games. This performance framework for videogames allows us to understand how videogames relate to other performance activities, as well as understand how they are a structured experience that can be designed. Theatrical performance is the basis of the framework, because it is the activity that has the most in common with games. Rather than explaining games in terms of ‘interactive drama,’ the parallels with theatre help us understand the role of players both as performers and as audience, as well as how the game design shapes the experience. The theatrical model also accounts for how videogames can have a spectatorship, and how the audience may have an effect on gameplay.

“Some Assembly Required”: Starting and Growing a Game Lab [Abstracts]

This panel will present case studies of four different game laboratories, exploring the uses of the lab as a research venue and as part of a game or digital media curriculum. The examples will focus on game labs in Humanities departments, where the use of laboratories as a resource is less common.

Evolution of Spatial Configurations In Videogames

This paper deals with the basic spatial configurations in videogames from early games until today, focusing on how they position the player with respect to the playfield, and how they affect gameplay. The basic spatial configurations are defined by a few basic features (cardinality of gameplay, cardinality of gameworld and representation) which combined can account for most videogame spaces.