Game design essay

Hi there,

I wrote an essay for a game design course that I attended a year ago in college. A friend of mine suggested that I send it in to a gaming magazine, and I've thought about doing that. But since I'm not a native speaker, I thought maybe you could help me get an insider perspective on my English writing skills. I love the English language, and I love writing and storytelling and am eager to learn more. Any commentary and critique is highly appreciated. I'm posting my introduction to the essay here as a sample of my writing. I hope it's not too long (or too boring.

---

Computer games are often compared to other forms of entertainment such as books and movies. The common idea is that, as opposed to classical entertainment where you are an observer, in games you can actually participate in the story as it unfolds, providing a far more immersing experience. There seem to be a general need for it to evolve to a new form of media through which the participants can experience stories that are meaningful and emotional.
So why is it that most games actually don’t provide that ultimate immersion into a story? Of course, you are immersed into the gameplay - you fire your gun frantically at hordes of monsters coming at you in a first-person action game; you develop heroic characters who can slay dragons with a flaming sword of doom to save the world in a role-playing game; you command huge armies of soldiers that are armed to the teeth on vast battlefields in a real-time strategy game. But after all those games are over, do you remember that brave soldier character who died trying to defend a military base on mars from an onslaught of aliens, how you felt enraged and sad when the wife of the main character was killed, or happy when they first fell in love?

Games are not the same thing as digital narrative entertainment. They may have existed, as suggested by Chris Crawford ("The Art of Computer Game Design"), since before mankind. There is no need for a game to have a story. However, there seem to be a desire for games that actually do tell a story. It is often thought that this would broaden the audience. So when a developer makes a game with a story, why not make that a really memorable one? Why aim for something less than what you can get by going to the cinema or reading a book?

The levels in an action first-person shooter (FPS) game are often empty of supporting characters. There is an imbalance between ally and enemy. Therefore, the environments the players go through often seem dead and cold; there is nothing to get emotionally attached to. There is usually nothing to emotionally motivate your actions, nothing to fight for.

Many games are memorable however, in the way that we remember the suspense, the atmosphere and the action, but not so much the story. It is a shallow remembrance; it often feels like it has no meaning or value except for the thrills and excitement it gave us (although that is usually a good thing, but not for the story experience).

The stories we have seen in games have become, especially in the last five years or so, better and better. They often have a lot of potential, but the gameplay and the story are dealt with as separate elements. The story isn’t really incorporated into the gameplay. Instead it is made into brief cut-scenes with weak characters and occasional uninspiring dialogues.

If the emotional resonance is imbued even into the gameplay itself by, as David Freeman (Gamasutra.com, July 24, 2002) suggests, using symbols to add emotional depth, the memory of the game, both gameplay and story, will be heightened.

I use the word gameplay here as it is defined by Richard Rouse III in "Game Design: Theory and Practice": “the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes.”

/T