Great Literature Great Games - Week 2 Reflection

After our second week, students are really beginning to think about how video games incorporate some of the same literary "stuff" that they are used to studying.  While in studying traditional literature we talk about character development differently, video games offer a whole new way of observing character development.

Most of the notes for this week's class come from Character Development and Storytelling For Games by Lee Sheldon.  In this text book, Sheldon highlights some of the major ways game developers handle character and story development in games.  While the book is pretty straightforward, I used video clips of new games in the power point presentations to show the students how the notes relate to some more recent games.

I allowed a bit more time this week to focus on game play because I wanted the students to have enough time to really dive into the game and connect with the characters.  We focused our attention on Heavy Rain, Alan Wake, L.A. Noir, and Uncharted 3.  Students kept game play logs with focus questions in order to focus their game play on analysis of the characters.

The reflection essays were both varied and thoughtful.  Here are a few excerpts from this week's reflection essays:

"...we can learn a lot about a character from more than just what he says and how he says it...Drawing clues from how a character looks and what they choose to surround themselves with is an important part of gameplay.  In this age of high-tech and extremely realistic graphics and movement, the smallest details can be important."

"...one can build believable characters not only by using techniques from literature and other forms of fiction, but by taking advantage of the potential of video games to tell a narrative in ways that other media cannot.  A video game by its very nature requires the play to be sympathetic to the player character's difficulties, usually physical, but also emotional."

"The two most important things for a [video game] character are its sociological and physical attributes because it really brings out the character more because it resembles a real person more."

At the end of the week, I believe my students have a better understanding of characterization and how character development is just as important in interactive fiction and storytelling as it is in traditional literature. As we look forward, we will focus on storytelling and narrative theory and discuss how characterization and character development plays a part in the development of story in video games.

Stay tuned!