In Defense of the Narrative

I am a gamer, but I’m a lot of other things too. I’m an engineering student, a member of the marching band, a writer, a game artist/programmer, and a whole host of other things. My time is pretty well divided up. This is not a problem in and of itself, and I really enjoy the variety.

Here's the problem: my favorite genre of game is the RPG. I love them and I hate them. I love the immersive storylines, the gameplay I can tweak to my style, the branching dialogues. But I start to hate myself for spending so much time playing them. One of my housemates even started poking fun at me this weekend for playing video games all day. I start to feel lazy when I see the hours played ticking upwards every time I save.

Just one more conversation....

Choice Systems

Oh boy. This turned out to be a monster of a post. Please try to bear with us, and not posting tl;dr would also be appreciated.

Up until now, the three of us writing here have all been working and writing separately, but this time we’re working together. Today we want to talk about choice systems in video games, with a focus on the popular ‘moral choice’ systems. We chose this topic after playing through inFamous a little while back. I’ve beaten inFamous on the good path, Shoofle has beaten it on the evil path, and Maggie has finished the good path and is working through the evil path now. Also, since we’re working together on this, the use of “I” at any point in this article could be referring to any of us. So try not to get too confused.

A word of warning, there will be a few minor spoilers for some games. We avoided all the big spoilers, but just letting you know.