I’m not actually much of a gamer. I’ve been playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery pretty steadily for the last five years and am up to level 3549 on Candy Crush, but my last time playing an actual video game was several years ago. I took Gamifying Historical Narratives out of sheer interest – because I know plenty of gamers who would have loved a course like this, and it seemed like an unusual approach to storytelling that I don’t have much experience with.
This intensive no doubt was the one I had the most fun with this semester. I spent an entire afternoon trying to solve a boardgame murder mystery and learned crucial approaches to historical adaption from Ian Hathaway. Ubisoft’s Maxime Durand was an incredibly engaging speaker that I could have listened to for literal days, and while I now know that I don’t actually want to make videogames, I did come out of the intensive with some important takeaways.
1) How we portray the past is determined to large extents by how we see that past now.
2) Works can be absolutely historically accurate and still be viewed as inaccurate if they don’t match public perception of history. See also the Tiffany Problem.
3) Authenticity over accuracy: ‘This could have happened’ rather than ‘This happened.’
4) It doesn’t actually take that much to create a mood. Users are suggestable, and nuance can achieve a lot.
This may have been the point where I decided to abandon the idea of illustrations for my final project. Yes, they’re common in visual novels, but visual elements that aren’t strictly images can also do a lot to create a mood.
Relating the other points to science fiction as a base genre for my Futures project, this is where the distinction between hard scifi and the other genres comes in. I don’t care overly much about creating scientific rationale for the things that are possible in my writing. If anything, this intensive made it clearer than ever that that’s unnecessary. Lots of things can be handwaved away as long as they seem possible. Which is not to slag off people who enjoy hard scifi, because there’s room for everyone. But it’s good to know what parts of my project I need to invest a lot of time and effort into, and which I don’t.
Leave a Reply