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Story Game Workshop 1: Improvisations on the Theme of Narrative
Tue-Sat, 7th-11th February 2006 Tracy Fullerton, Visiting Assistant Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television This workshop will extend the concepts introduced in the lecture, providing a series of hands-on exercises, which explore several different ways to create game systems that support player story-making and emergent narration as an integral part of game play. Emphasis throughout will be on creation of physical game prototypes, playtesting and iteration using fellow workshop participants to provide immediate feedback to the designers. A number of models for this type of player created narrative will be investigated, including surrealist "story" games, several types of theater games, improvisational scenarios and participatory narratives. Examples of player story "construction" in these games, focusing on how roles for player agency are constructed, will be analyzed, underlying the tensions between narrative and interactivity, agency and empathy, and essential narrative elements such as character, conflict, story, theme and point of view. In addition to looking at these experiences for inspiration, the workshop will prompt participants to examine of how narrative and interactive moments collide in each experience, to understand how each model stresses responsiveness, creativity, problem-solving, fantasy, and collaboration on the part of the players. Then, using these structures as starting points, participants will design their own participatory narrative systems and playtest them with the rest of the workshop. |