After briefly paddling into the choppy waters of emotions in video games, I have momentarily paused that train of thought in pursuit of one of my initial thought topics which I now believe has yet more importance then I gave it credit for.
"Does the genre of a game affect the importance of narrative, and how?"
I have been pondering this since I first thought of it it during our first 'proper' masters class, though yesterday I found myself considering the actual depth of the question. Initially I thought it was rather cut and dry, genres such as sport and puzzle game had less regard for narrative as say role-playing or adventure games. However as I look further into the depths of narrative as an idea I find it less so. I was particularly intrigued upon reading this blog post about Minecraft ( http://blog.failbettergames.com/post/One-Hundred-Miles-of-Solitude.aspx), the post by an author known as Alexis expresses the idea of Intrinsic and extrinsic narrative in video games.
This dictates that the extrinsic narrative is one which is set from the beginning and already in place, whereas the intrinsic narrative is the circumstantial narrative built by the player as they play through the game. Upon reading the article the narrative concept resonated with me in regards to my genre question, in that perhaps different genres put more importance upon either one of these genres or both as a whole. Through that way of thinking the sports and puzzle games I previously thought had little concept of narrative perhaps just have a more variable form of intrinsic narrative (for example in FIFA the narrative built would be the goings on in the individual matches).
I will continue to think about this and I have tasked myself with conjuring prime examples of each genre and trying to figure what their individual narrative consists of.
I will also try to properly reference this article, I just need to figure out the correct method to do so.
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