We Make Holes In Teeth

Why We Write, Pt. 1

I expect that the meat of this post will develop into a sort of standard introduction, by way of back-rationalization, to the benefits of Narrative Game Design as a formal practice. This isn't the first time I've tried to do this, but it may end up being the most pragmatic approach so far. After all this time, there are still people at the studio where I work who do not understand why there should be someone on the core design team - different from (or not only) the scriptwriter - who cares about the story of the game. Someone who is involved in the production from concept to gold master. Lately, my tried and true flippant response to people like that has been to hold up a very complicated flowchart printed out on tiled 11x17 sheets, explaining that "this is the story". But frankly, this seems a little glib.

Luckily, in the course of doing research for the Familiarity talk, I ended up reading the frequently-referenced paper by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth on Game Flow that lays out an excellent and rather thorough framework for examining how any particular aspect of a game's design contributes to the overall player experience. And since I've been arguing for a while now that the narrative is implicated in - you heard me - every aspect of the player experience, I now have a mouth with which to co-locate my money.

I am old.

I know this because when I run down the sidewalk, away from the pursuing kamikaze snowplows, screaming "It's people...! Soylent Green is PEOPLE!", none of my coworkers get it.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt, Pt. 2

I'm starting this post without knowing for sure that by the time I get to the pseudo-mathematical parts I'll have tracked down, installed and mastered the use of a proper formula typesetting tool. In other words, I am assuming a certain amount of calculated risk, on balance convinced that I will be able to overcome this challenge and deliver a desired result.

When I encounter a challenge (of any sort, not just typographic), what is it in my head that makes me think: "I can do this. Probably." -- ?

Do I literally calculate the odds of success? Only partly. And only if I have the benefit of some distance from the reality of the challenge, some breathing room, time to think, a level of abstraction. But mostly, I intuit the apparent likelihood of success/risk of failure and compare that fuzzy notion to some indefinable threshold, or risk-tolerance.

And yet, odds can be calculated or at least estimated; and statistically speaking that estimate can grow more precise with larger amounts of sample data on which to draw. So what does that mean? How do I reconcile the coexistence of risk as a gut sense of likely success vs risk as a quantitative expression of probability? When you put those two concepts side-by-side with each other, it seems like there might be an incongruity there.