Exercises

2.7 Premise:

• Risk: The Premise for Risk is that two-six world leaders struggle for control over regions of the world, such as countries in Africa or Europe. They can take over countries or engage in war with other countries controlled by other world leaders. This can be done through diplomatic means, alliances or open warfare where soldiers are sent into different countries to fight wars.
•  Clue: The Premise for Clue is that each player is an intricate and eccentric character, characters who all find themselves within a house or mansion where a murder has been committed. These eccentric characters must find clues throughout the house which will bring them closer to finding who amongst them committed the murder. Finally, once enough clues have been rounded, these characters can begin to accuse one another.
• Plague Inc: The Premise of Plague Inc is that two types of diseases, Viruses and Bacteria, compete with each other over a world map to evolve and improve themselves to control and infect as many cities on the world map as possible, in order to kill them off.
• Guitar Hero: The Premise of Guitar Hero is that you play a guitarist in a rock band which plays in different shows and venues. The band starts off with minimum popularity playing in small venues, but as it becomes more popular with the more songs you successfully play, the band plays bigger venues and earns increased popularity on a quest to become a legendary rock band.

2.8 Story:

God of War 2018 Remake/Sequel: This game’s story is especially gripping because it unfolds very organically and emotionally. To start off with, the premise of the game is very simple with one objective: to get Kratos’s late wife’s ashes to the highest mountain in the Nordic landscape as a coming of age trial for his son, Atreus. However, as the game unfolds, other larger events than the initial objective unfold, when the Nordic gods discover Kratos’s true identity as the Greek God of War and attempt to kill him. As your journey becomes more complex, with reaching the mountain becoming an extremely arduous task, you meet NPCs along the way which have a rich dialogue and with which the player can easily get emotionally attached to. This is a very challenging aspect of games as many games tend to oversaturate the game with NPCs who feel empty. God of War however adds only a handful of recurring NPCs who all have rich backstories and dialogue. Furthermore, the way that the game’s cinematic elements mix with the gameplay and story themselves is truly outstanding. As a result, what began as a singular quest eventually evolves into an emotional and dramatic journey in which Kratos and his son truly build their father-son relationship in a very gripping way. Indeed, at the very beginning, they are both tense with each other, especially on Kratos’s part, but by the end of the game they are strongly and emotionally attached.

4.1 Making Checkers Dramatic:

Backstory: Two kings are fighting over a trench to capture and kill the royal tents, with their armies, found in the King’s row at the back of the far ends of the board. Each piece found on this row represents a member of the royal family: the son, nephew, cousins or brothers and sisters of the king (which is the player). 

Pieces: Each of the back row pieces will be different small sculptures (like in chess but more realistic), which represent a son, daughter, sister or nephew of the king. All other pieces will represent soldiers.

Pieces could also be tokens like the regular checkers but with two sides (one is a pleasant happy image of the person and the one below is an injured or generally distraught image of the person) in order to show when you have conquered and dominated a piece.

Board: The two rows in the middle of the board represent the trench, in which soldiers will face their first casualties. The areas beyond these represent where the armies will stand and the royal row beyond.

Result: Upon playing this new version with paper prototypes, it was clear that the game was more dramatized for the players in that it added a feeling of loss at losing soldiers and members of the royal family. Indeed, since there are now faces and characters for the checker pieces, players become more attached to them and distraught at their loss. The effect, I must say, is closer to chess in which certain pieces gain more meaning and importance and their loss leads to certain feelings of heavy defeat. Nevertheless, the dramatic effects on players are not enormously pronounced as the game is still a simple checkers game, just with more information for the player.

4.6: Premise:

• God of War (2018 remake): God of War’s premise follows the story of a strict father figure who attempts to teach his young son how to grow into adulthood and as such tasks him on a journey to take his late mother’s ashes to the highest mountain in the Nordic mythological universe as a right of passage. This enhances the game in that it sets a simple goal/task early on in the game for the player to understand and follow and then builds off of it. Indeed, the objective may seem clear and simple but it works very well as a skeleton and foundation which the game effectively builds off of by introducing obstacles and difficulties throughout the game that divert Kratos and his son Atreus to different branches of the story.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: RDR2 follows the aftermath of a group of outlaws’ escape from their hometown after the authorities managed to figure out their plans and chase them down. The story then follows the group’s resettlement into a different region and their life starting anew. This premise is useful in that it gives new and old players a new slate to work with and an opportunity to forge their own story around the premise of the game. Indeed, they are free to choose different paths within the story that leads to different choices and branches in the overall story arch. As such, it effectively makes the player feel like they are part of Arthur’s (the main character) story and his life.
• Resident Evil 7: RE7 is based on a man’s discovery of his wife’s last known location before she disappeared years ago and follows his quest to investigate this location and hopefully find his wife. Although this premise is simple, RE7 interestingly completes the main character’s objective early on by introducing his wife as the first other character in the game, but with a twist; his wife has become infected by a mind controlling virus that causes her to be hostile with different powers. As such, the premise of the game evolves into the main character attempting to get his wife back and navigate through the property of a deranged and infected family of hillbillies who constantly toy with him and torture him. This premise evolution provides an interesting and ambiguous path for the player and a need to see what happens next.
• Bioshock: Bioshock also has a simple enough premise from the getgo in that it follows a plane crash survivor’s journey to escape an underwater city that he travelled to in need of help and to survive drowning out in the open sea. However, he realizes that the city’s inhabitants have gone insane and are hostile to the player. An escape premise works well here in that it provides the player with an easy to understand objective, like with God of War’s premise, but then can also easily introduce curves and branches to the main premise, which Bioshock does perfectly. Indeed, the player is introduced to other NPCs which attempt to help them escape Rapture (the city), with some giving the player tasks to perform in exchange for information or help. Eventually, there is a massive twist in the game which deepens the premise of the game and throws away everything the player believed in and attempted to achieve throughout the game. As such, Bioshock effectively introduces a premise and then gets rid of it late in the game to introduce a different objective, which is always a fun way of going about a game’s story.
• Sekiro-Shadows Die Twice: Sekiro follows the story of a dishonored shinobi who attempts to reclaim his honor by saving his master from the captivity of a warlord and then attempting to realize his master’s wish of severing his immortal heritage. This premise has different levels of complexity because it is introduced in different stages where it leads the player to believe that the shinobi’s main mission is to save his master from captivity, which is only the early objective of the game. The game then sends the player to different locations to acquire different items to use for the immortal severance, but it does so while at the same time giving the player hints that the story can lead elsewhere if the player wants it to. Indeed, it has other NPCs speak to the player and offer alternative questlines that go beyond severing the master’s immortality. These questlines also lead to different endings as well as different bosses that the player needs to fight, these often being previously non-hostile NPCs. As such, Sekiro effectively juggles with the ambiguity of a simple premise and transforms it into something more layered and complex.

4.7: Game Characters:

• Kratos (God of War 2018): Kratos is an interesting character in that he is a Greek God who values strength above all, yet in the game his character is very human like, with emotional weaknesses and genuine love for his son. The character is structured expertly and excellently as you play the game in that in the initial phase of the game he is harsh and stoic with his son, with very little dialogue, leading the player to believe that he must be a boring strict father type figure. However, as the game progresses and his relationship with his son becomes threatened, tense and worn, Kratos begins to show signs that his harsh exterior is beginning to crumble due to the love for his son and his need to protect him from the harshness of the world. Indeed, Kratos even goes so far as to unbury his past which has tormented him for decades in order to save his son’s life, and become the monster that he has always feared and attempted to pushback since his leaving from Greece. As such, Kratos works well as a very human character, easily comparable to characters like those of The Last of Us, juxtaposed with his godly manner of not succumbing to human emotions.
• Joel (The Last of Us): Joel represents the epitome of a very human character in a crisis. Indeed, very early on in the game, he loses his daughter to the epidemic of zombie infestation and the subsequent chaos that it brings with it. As such, we gain an emotional attachment to him as players as the story of the game takes place years after the loss of his daughter. In this time Joel is more stoic and keeps his emotions bottled down, but still attempts to look outwardly happy and humorous to other people within the community of survivors that he lives with. However, when he rescues a girl similar to his daughter, his emotions begin to change and he soon becomes protective of her, despite his reluctance in the beginning due to his past trauma. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to save her from danger whenever it appears, while the relationship between the two characters becomes more realistic and organic. As such, we see the development of a human character very well in this game and the emotional change he goes through.
• BJ Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein reboot): Although Blazkowicz has all the tropes of the traditional action hero character who is on a quest to stop the Nazis from achieving world domination, he is represented as a very human character, something that most action heroes lack, especially in movies like Die Hard or Rambo. Indeed, he may be displayed to be a man of inhuman strength and endurance, but the player is made to feel his exhaustion and emotional trauma with the losses he has faced in the past as well as his own physical and mental exhaustion of continuing to fight an uphill battle. Indeed, we constantly see him having internal dialogues with pessimistic tones where he longs for rest and the release that death can bring. As such this character connects with the player in that the player actually cares for BJ and his survival as we try to will him onwards in the fight, no matter how injured or traumatized he gets along the way.

4.8: Story:

God of War (2018 remake)- God of War is one of the games that successfully manages to combine and blend in its cinematic and dramatic elements along with the gameplay fluently and expertly, without jarring transitions from one or the other. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous exercises, the general story and objective of the game is simple, but it constantly builds in complexity and emotion as you progress through the game. In fact, it has the player thinking that they are getting closer and closer to the end objective of the game, but every time an obstacle is presented to hinder progress towards that goal, extending the story and the game itself. In terms of gameplay, the story transitions from cinematic scenes which show the emotional turmoil between Kratos and his son to actual gameplay that changes based on the current relationship between the two characters. An example would be just after the two have a fierce argument a fighting sequence breaks out where Kratos is overwhelmed by enemies. However, when the player tries to use Atreus to help Kratos defeat the enemies, he is unresponsive and simply walks in the background refusing to help his father. As such, God of War effectively represents the story of the game and its essence in the gameplay very smoothly.