A Gamer and A Scholar ← A Place for Games and Other Sundry

RTSs and Narrative Freedom

Jan

2013

Last week I talked all about how I thought RTSs got story wrong. Today I’m going to turn around and write a little piece about what it is they’ve gotten right. There are a number of things to take issue with in the way RTSs tend to tell their stories, but one of the ones ...

Building Character: Integrating Narrative in RTSs

Jan

2013

Have you ever played an RTS (Real Time Strategy game) with a good story? With a narrative that was well executed, interesting, resonant and meaningful? Yeah, neither have I. This is not to say that some RTSs haven’t done a pretty good job. Blizzard’s offerings, for example, tend to execute their stories pretty well, and ...

XCOM’s Moral Choices

Jan

2013

Now it’s time to make good on my promise last week of a hypothetical moral choice system for XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I choose XCOM for two reasons: first, it’s the game I’ve finished and written about most recently, and second, in my post on the plot some weeks ago, I raised the possibility of integrating ...

The Right Thing To Do 1

Dec

2012

Good or bad? You’ve got to pick one, and you need to be consistent, else instead of smiting your enemies with holy fire or the damning them to the pits of hell, you’re left warming them with a blessed match or scolding them with an evil looking pothole. That’s how most morality systems work in ...

XCOM and the Abyss 1

Nov

2012

I’m not sure anyone would argue that XCOM isn’t a good game, in fact it’s a damn excellent game with complexity, difficulty, and depth that we see only too rarely these days. I should be clear here: I’m not talking about the gameplay (though that is all those things too), I’m talking about the narrative. “But,” ...

Honor Thyself

Nov

2012

What does it mean to honor a fictional character? I wrote last week about the parameters of acceptable loss, about what made the difference between a loss I was willing to accept and one I felt forced to reload. I looked at the question in terms of comparing a lost soldier’s value as either a ...

Acceptable Losses

Nov

2012

I, along with many of you I imagine, have sunk endless hours into XCOM: Enemy Unknown since its release, desperately trying save the world from an ever intensifying alien invasion. And, as much as I try and stay true to the desperate nature of that struggle, I have a confession to make: I’ve been save-scumming. ...