LIBR 251: Storytelling Through Video Games

Despite the slight stigma behind video games as an art form, the games industry has been pumping out games with excellent narratives for a while now, though especially in recent years. It's not just the triple-a industry that can put together movie-quality products anymore, and each year technology advances, we get more and more creative games from studios who can finally afford to make their stories come to life. Video games can be a storytelling artifice just like any other form, be it novel, movie, or theater. The only difference between games and other narrative vehicles is that when you watch a movie or read a book, you're just absorbing information, whereas games have an interactivity to them that allows for fantastic levels of immersion. I'm glad for the opportunity to talk about this subject on a blog like this, as it is a subject I find myself very invested in. I've run blogs for classes before, both on Wordpress and Blogger, but until now they've all b

Sometimes you experience things at the exact right time in your life, and the emotional weight is entirely different than if it were to have happened otherwise. Playing  Night in the Woods was one of those experiences for me, and seeing how this blog aims to cover narrative brilliance in video gaming, I couldn't not include it in my list. Night in the Woods is categorized as a side-scrolling adventure game, though in truth, it has very few instances of actual adventuring throughout. Put simply, this game is a walk-and-talk simulator with cartoony, anthropomorphic animals, though putting it under that kind of description seems unduly cynical, when the game is anything but. The story that occurs throughout the game isn't a world-ending threat, or a quest for love, or any other dramatic plot device. You control Mae Borowski, an impulsive, immature college drop-out returning to her small home-town of Possum Springs after a rather disastrous year abroad. But the town isn

Hollow Knight is a game that is very special to me, a mix of the best things of Dark Souls and the challenging platforming found in classic Metroidvania games. There's not much I can talk about before gushing about the art style, so let's get this out of the way first. This. Game. Is. Beautiful. Hollow Knight is a 2D action-platformer by TeamCherry Games, an indie studio with one published game under their belt: this one. Hollow Knight boasts an expansive, layered world for you to explore, each background element hand-drawn and each action, effect and environmental piece hand-animated. The colours are bold, sound design is top-notch, and the area designs are a mix of dark-gothic architecture and stunning sprawls of hostile caverns. The game takes place almost entirely in the grand, underground city of Hallownest, where an ancient being called the Pale King has given sentience to his insectoid subjects so they can worship him as a god.

The Fallout games tell stories about a lot of things. Fallout: 1 and Fallout: 3 tackle themes like the strength of the human spirit through tremendous adversity, Fallout: 2 is a story about self-discovery and the weight of expectations, and Fallout: 4 is a semi-successful statement about the worth of family and the failings of corruptible world powers. Fallout: New Vegas , however, the fourth canonical entry in the series, focuses its narrative attention on a topic that is much more philosophical in its approach: the misinterpretation of symbols, and the lengths people go to for causes greater than themselves. Before I jump into the meat of this dissection, some context for the world that the game is set in:  (if in-game history isn't your thing, the article continues as normal after the  italics: ) The Fallout games take place around 200 years after nuclear Armageddon has wiped out most of the civilized world. This so called “Great War” was brought on mai

Conclusion I used to run a blog, and this is honestly the sort of thing that I do for fun. I absolutely love working with HTML coding! So this was one of the more fun projects I’ve been able to do this semester! I love being able to share things that I’m passionate about, and storytelling is certainly one of them. I chose to not go into as much detail because I wanted the readers to play those games and live the stories for themselves. One of the best things about gaming is getting to dive into this universe that someone else created, which is why gaming is a lot like reading a book and having a story told you that way. One of the things that I learned early on is that WordPress isn't the easiest to navigate and Blogger is just the way to go. There weren't too many challenges. This project made me want to go back and relive the games that I talked about. I wanted to go back into the Dragon Age world and play through a completely different story. I wanted to get a bunc

The Butterfly Effect Until Dawn This post does contain mature themes, as well as spoilers.  Please note that viewer discretion is advised when reading this.                                                                                                                                     Until Dawn,  wikia. Have you ever seen a typical teen horror movie? You know what I’m talking about. A few friends get together and go out to some cabin way up in the mountains. There's drinking, partying, and usually, someone gets lucky. Everything seems all fine and dandy until they cut away and we see a man standing outside of the house. One would think that the man is the reason someone will die, but it's the exact opposite. Until Dawn is a supernatural horror game that's exclusive to Sony Entertainment. This game is based on The Butterfly Effect. As said by one of the in-game title screens: “A tiny butterfly flapping it’s wings today may lead to a devastating

                                                                                                                              Humble Bundle. Don't Starve The quirky music, the creepy characters, and the almost cute enemies. Don't Starve is a survival game bordering on the horror game line. It has Lovecraftian elements, and it will have you yelling the strangest things at the television. While it doesn't really have a set plotline, it does have a bit of backstory, which is what the below video is! Watch it before you continue reaching this!                                                                                                                  YouTube. Klei Entertainment's two-dimensional game is filled with magic, science, and survival. In the original game, you play as a gentleman scientist named Wilson. Wilson gets trapped by a demon and sent into a world filled with creatures and even plants that want to kill him. It's your job to su

                                                                                                                                    Dragon Age Wiki . The Dawn Will Come Dragon Age: Inquisition A video game is another way of telling a story. BioWare's 2014 release of the third game in the Dragon Age series is one of the better ones out there. From the diverse characters to the open worlds, it's a favourite among the fans and the players. But what makes it so memorable? Dragon Age Inquisition brings us many of our favourite characters from both Dragon Age Origins, including Leliana, a bard, and a Spymaster to Morrigan, the Witch of the Wilds. We see favourites from Dragon Age 2, Varric Tethras being one as well as Cassandra Pentaghast and we even get to see The Champion of Kirkwall, either Garrett or Marian Hawke- depending on whether you played a male or female in Dragon Age 2.                                                                          

I can’t say that I have learned anything that I didn’t already know before starting this blog. I know that I find blogs difficult to deal with and manage, and that technology rarely seems to want to cooperate. I did enjoy researching Dark Souls lore and telling the stories of Angels of Death and Aria’s Story. The greatest challenge I faced was attempting to summarize the story best I could and limit it to only points that were relevant in the main story. I had to include small bits that I found funny or I felt was fundamental to show what the characters were like. I hoped I was successful in showing the stories in video games and hopefully encourage others to try video games for their stories rather than game play. I hope that others will try to look more into stories of video games and see if there is a book series that the game is either based off of or that the game inspired a story. Good games can be made into books and good books can be made into games. Both are formats of ent