To tea or not to tea, that is the question.
Continue reading “Review: Fire Emblem Three Houses Fódlan Teas [In Progress]”Author: Justin Bortnick
MGP: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX2)
MGP: Metal Gear (1987, MSX2)
Day 1
I’ve actually taken a quick run at this before when I saw it was included in the Vita version of MGS3. For reference, I bought that in 2017, so it’s been five years since then. I got frustrated pretty quickly and put it down, but now I’m back for revenge – Snake’s Revenge. I’m also using a guide so I don’t just wander around dying and losing all my progress repeatedly. Ain’t nobody got time for that, I have a franchise to tackle!
Metal Gear Project
On Hallowe’en Eve, 2022, I made a perhaps foolish decision, announced publicly in a thread on Resetera, that I was going to finally try and finish not only my first Metal Gear franchise game, but all of the canonical ones, and write up my thoughts and experiences while playing each one.
Continue reading “Metal Gear Project”Translation: “Parallel Worlds” [Interview with Hiroyuki Kanno, Sega Saturn Magazine, Vol. 24, 18 July 1997]
tl note: In this interview, Kanno is referred to as Kenno, as he was sometimes credited as “Yukihiro Kenno”.
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Full Translation of 並 列世界 [“Parallel Worlds”]
Interview With Kanno Hiroyuki
Sega Saturn Magazine, Vol. 24, July 18-24 1997
Aiming for a system that doesn’t blindfold you
―I know that some of our readers have never played YU-NO before. First of all, please tell us about the key aspects in YU-NO.
Kenno: A.D.M.S (Adams), a new multi-system, will be the key element. It stands for “Auto Diverge Mapping System,” which directly translates to “automatic branch mapping function.” In conventional games with branching narratives, it is difficult to identify the branching points in the story. It can be fun to look for branches, but at the same time, there are times when you have to look at the same scene over and over again, and you have to go through a sometimes annoying trial and error process. A.D.M.S. was created to solve this problem.
Depending on the player’s actions and decisions, the story will branch out and be created in a variety of ways. A.D.M.S. is a visual map that displays the branching situation in a tree (see previous page), and a chime (sound effects) is sounded when a branching point approaches, allowing players to grasp the situation with their eyes and ears. Checking your position on the map, collecting various items and information, and navigating various branching worlds…… This is [A.D.M.S].
Why NarraScope? Motivations for Organizing a Game Narrative Conference
At GDC 2018, I was hurrying through the convention center (frazzled, no doubt, about my upcoming talk about designing Frog Fractions 2’s narrative and alternate reality game) when an unobtrusive flyer on a table caught my attention. “Get on board the early hype train for the new Narrative Interactive Fiction Adventure Games Convention” it read, and I was intrigued.
Continue reading “Why NarraScope? Motivations for Organizing a Game Narrative Conference”
Interview: Johnnemann Nordhagen
On February 9, 2019, I interviewed Johnnemann Nordhagen of Dim Bulb Games about his game Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, the role of storytelling and narrative in interactive media, the politics of representation in video games and America as a national myth. The interview was conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation research at the University of Southern California, and can be heard at the Red Pages Podcast website.
Interview: Jeff Kaplan
On January 31, 2019, I interviewed Jeff Kaplan of Activision-Blizzard’s Overwatch team about his time in the video games industry and creative insights into the craft of making games. The interview was conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation research at the University of Southern California, and can be heard at the Red Pages Podcast website.
Emergent Meaning and Narrative in the Digital Space
Emergent Meaning and Narrative in the Digital Space
Addressing Tensions in Games and Game-like Media
“Most people want to be told a story. Leaving it up to a random number generator is dicey.” – Ed Del Castillo, Producer, Command & Conquer
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in human culture. Throughout the centuries we as a species have invented many ways to tell ourselves stories, and continue to do so. In recent years, games have become one of the most popular formats for delivering narrative, but as a new form of storytelling, narrative games face several critical issues.[1] Although the problems facing this burgeoning medium are not insurmountable, they are uniquely twisted by the fact that games are, by their nature, a participatory endeavor – a transaction between the designers and players where the contact is far more direct than it is in other forms of popular storytelling. Although as an industry games are growing and are doing much better than older, more established mediums in the marketplace, critical thinking about games, and especially how narratives in games are constructed, is still in its infancy. There are at least two fundamental unresolved questions in games criticism –, “how do games mean?” and “how do games tell compelling stories?” Answering both of these questions is a much larger task than I am capable of achieving in this essay, but by the end I hope to provide a potential framework for how games mean and from there briefly propose a solution to the narrative question.
Continue reading “Emergent Meaning and Narrative in the Digital Space”
Ludic Epistolary or, Where Have All The Letters Gone?
In this essay, I discuss the evolution of epistolary fiction from its early days in novels through modern incarnations in video games.
Continue reading “Ludic Epistolary
or, Where Have All The Letters Gone?”
Justin Bortnick 