Jim Bizzocchi

Mass Effect 2 A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the design of narrative within Mass Effect 2: a game whose narrative is highly regarded in both scholarly and vernacular communities. We follow the classic humanities methodology of “close-reading”: the detailed observation, deconstruction, and analysis of a text. Our close-reading employs a critical framework from our previous work to isolate and highlight the central narrative design parameters within digital games. This framework is grounded in the scholarly discourse around games and narrative, and has been tested and revised in the process of close-reading and analyzing contemporary games. The narrative design parameters we examine are character, storyworld, narrativized interface, emotion, and plot coherence. Our analysis uses these parameters to explicate a series of design decisions for the effective creation of narrative experience in Mass Effect 2, and by extension, for game narratives in general. We also expand our previous methodology through a focused “edge-case” strategy for exploring the limits of character, action, and story in the game. Finally, we position our analysis of Mass Effect 2 within contemporary discourses of “bounded agency”, and explore how the game negotiates the tension between player-expression, and narrative inevitability to create opportunities for sophisticated narrative poetics including tragedy and sacrifice.

Experiencing the reading glove

In this paper we describe the Reading Glove, a wearable RFID reader for interacting with a tangible narrative. Based on interviews with study participants, we present a set of observed themes for understanding how the wearable and tangible aspects of the Reading Glove influence the user experience. We connect our observational themes to theoretical notions from interactive narrative and tangible interaction to create a set of design considerations such as enacting a role, ownership and permission, multiplicity of interpretations and boundary objects.

A Case Study in the Design of Interactive Narrative: The Subversion of the Interface

There is a potential conflict in the design of interactive narratives. The exercise of interaction in digital environments, including games, may interfere with the experience of story. The article uses the interactive CDROMCEREMONYOFINNOCENCE as a case study in the resolution of this potential conflict. It frames the design of this interactive narrative as the reconciliation of two independent design domains: the design of narrative and interactive design. Narrative design seeks a state of immersive surrender to the work. In contrast, interaction privileges choice and its consequences according to the logic of the interactive world. CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE uses two tactics to overcome this disjuncture. The first is the broad infusion of narrative sensibilities in the detailed design of the work’s subsidiary craft (sound, graphics, moving images, and text). The second tactic is to suborn certain design specifics of the interactive interface to the goals of narrative design.

Rich-narrative Case Study for Online Pbl in Medical Education

Case studies are the basis of a well-known medical education pedagogy called problem-based learning (PBL). Traditional case studies are paper based and contain brief medical facts about a patient’s illness. The authors of this article argue for a rich-narrative PBL design, and they report on a pilot project that incorporated such a design. The term “rich narrative” in this article covers two attributes. The first is the development of case studies that are rich in narrative information (often called “thick narrative”). The second component of rich narrative is the presentation of these thick narrative case studies in a media-rich format—that is, video rather than the traditional paper-based cases. Rich-narrative case studies may provide a more robust context for learning than traditional case studies because the rich cases more accurately reflect the complex reality of patient presentation and interaction. They also may help to lay the foundation for the development of a more holistic and patient-centered awareness during the training of health professionals. The use of video as a case presentation tool adds to this robust depiction of the patient as a complete human being rather than a collection of written symptoms. The authors discuss the power of narrative in learning, the significance of rich-narrative in medical education, the steps they took to develop a video-based, rich-narrative case study for online PBL tutorials at Simon Fraser University, and the evaluation of their prototype used in 2008.

Rock Band: a case study in the design of embodied interface experience

There has been a recent surge of novel interface devices available for home gaming systems. With the rise in popularity of games like Guitar Hero and consoles such as Nintendos Wii comes new opportunities for game design at the interface level. In this paper we propose three interrelated dimensions for the analysis of embodied and gestural game interface hardware devices. We demonstrate how gestural and embodied interactions can be understood as ludic, kinesthetic and narrative experiences. We ground this discussion in a close analysis of the interface affordances of the game Rock Band and demonstrate how these three dimensions allow us to understand more clearly the place of the interface in the design and the experience of games.

Time and space in digital game storytelling

The design and representation of time and space are important in any narrative form. Not surprisingly there is an extensive literature on specific considerations of space or time in game design. However, there is less attention to more systematic analyses that examine both of these key factors--including their dynamic interrelationship within game storytelling. This paper adapts critical frameworks of narrative space and narrative time drawn from other media and demonstrates their application in the understanding of game narratives. In order to do this we incorporate fundamental concepts from the field of game studies to build a game-specific framework for analyzing the design of narrative time and narrative space. The paper applies this framework against a case analysis in order to demonstrate its operation and utility. This process grounds the understanding of game narrative space and narrative time in broader traditions of narrative discourse and analysis.

Games, narrative and the design of interface

There is a potential disconnection between the experience of narrative and the active decision-making necessary for successful gameplay. Gameplayers must oscillate between a hypermediated participation in game decisions, and the transparent pleasure in the narrative frame of the game (Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Manovich, 2001). This paper analyses one critical locus for facilitating player oscillation and bridging the gap between narrative pleasure and gameplay interaction. Narrative dynamics can be designed directly into the focus of active gameplay – the game interface. This paper identifies and explicates four separate design approaches for integrating narrative within the game’ interface: (1) a narrativised ‘look and feel’ of the interface; (2) behavioural mimicking and behavioural metaphors; (3) narrativised perspective and (4) ‘bridging’ and mixed-reality interfaces. These concepts are useful for describing, analysing and understanding how narrative experience can be instantiated within the game interface. Application of these concepts can help to reveal useful strategies for conjoining ludic play with narrative pleasure. Collectively, this approach is a step towards creating a common theoretical vocabulary for discussing the phenomenon of narrativised game interface.

DJ-MVP: An Automatic Music Video Producer

A music video (MV) is a videotaped performance of a recorded popular song, usually accompanied by dancing and visual images. In this paper, we outline the design of a generative music video system, which automatically generates an audio-video mashup for a given target audio track. The system performs segmentation for the given target song based on beat detection. Next, according to audio similarity analysis and color heuristic selection methods, we obtain generated video segments. Then, these video segments are truncated to match the length of audio segments and are concatenated as the final music video. An evaluation of our system has shown that users are receptive to this novel presentation of music videos and are interested in future developments.

Re:Cycle : a generative ambient video engine

Re:Cycle is a visual poem, improvised in real-time by a system of deceptively simple rules relating to luminance and chrominance values in a set of moving image shots. Richly textured natural images of snow, mountains, rivers, and sky slowly unfold in a never-ending sequence that constantly changes. The resulting complex ambient video repudiates the standard cinematic conventions of linear narrative, and draws the viewer into an active creation of meaning for the work.

Enhanced Pixel-Based Video Frame Interpolation Algorithms

In this paper, we compare three motion compensated interpolation (MCI) algorithms: adjacent-frame motion compensated interpolation (AFI), wide-span motion compensated interpolation (WS-TH), and wide-span motion compensated interpolation with spatial hinting (WS-TH+SH). The latter represents an extension to WS-TH by adding spatial hinting to the generation of motion vectors. The methods are quantitatively compared with the objective of optimizing interpolated frame quality relative to control interpolated frames. This is important because for high-resolution large flat-panel displays, frame transition coherence becomes a critical factor in assessing the quality of the users viewing experience. To enhance MCI, the encoder should attempt to exploit long-term statistical dependencies, precisely estimate motion by modeling the motion vector field, and superimpose efficient prediction/interpolation algorithms. Computer simulations using artificially generated video sequences demonstrate the consistent advantage of both WS- TH and WS-TH+SH over AFI under increasingly complex source scenes and chaotic occlusion conditions.