Hamlet on the Holodeck talks about different type of storytelling through various media. When I first read the second chapter, it was interesting to see how different media would tell different stories but I kept disconnecting as the author would keep going in depth with their examples. The examples themselves were not bad but to the length the author went to explain disconnected me from the subject.
The author talks about narrative in moves and books and how audiences react to it. The author talks about how to setup a character to make people feel, an example they gave was that the main character could have a dog that the audience could spend time with but while hunting the main character knows that it’s dangerous but the dog goes in. The main character is worried and when the dog returns it is heavily injured and it dies in your arms. This creates strong feelings in within the audience. This story game me a small idea to make a choice based 4th wall breaking game where at times no what the player picks the character the player is controlling turns back looks at the ‘game scene camera’ and is like now I am not doing that. The characters eyes darken like they are possessed by something else.
Later in the chapter the author talks about storytelling in videogames. The author draws parallels to stories told in movies and stories told in games. The author says that making a game into a movie is quite difficult since the game just doesn’t talk about life from a single persons perspective. The author also talks about how narrative can be changed to match different genre of games like action games would have a fast pace story but puzzle games that are meant to be slower can have a story within it too.
Reading through the second chapter of Hamlet on the Holodeck I realised how much the gaming industry is bound by labels from from movies and books. Half the time these labels don’t accurately represent the game.