Some people reading this might already know what I’m going to be discussing here, it’s in the name after all. And I’m not going to do anything that unusual with the premise, just explain the basics.
Text can be more than the words written on the screen… or page if you are from the previous millennium I guess. The written word can carry additional meanings hidden in between the individual words and phrases, extra bits of information inferrable from the larger body of text. Facts that are not explicit, but instead implicitly embedded into it, through context, subtext, inferable information, etc.
The point is, text in a game doesn’t need to spell everything out; it can leave things unspoken, yet clear. Or in other applications, some information is purposefully omitted from explicit mention for various reasons. But today I’m not going to talk about being vague… I’ll get back to that another time. Today I’m going to discuss being subtle with the information passed to the audience through text… and in some extended sense, dialogue.
When discussing death in fiction, specifically fantasy but not always just fantasy (I’m looking at you hardcore posthumanism), the topic of resurrection is inescapable. It’s just something that often crops up as a mechanic, generally thrown in completely pointlessly into the game, that on its own holds power to consume the whole narrative.
Yes, all of it, the whole thing. Just gobble gobble gobble like an American at an all-you-can-eat grease buffet.
There are just some scenes in video games that hit me particularly… accurately, right in the dumb monkey emotion gland.
Having just revisited one of them, I’ve been stricken by a fay mood, and I feel like maybe talking about death in games a little bit. But before I can get there with a clear conscience, let’s first talk about death in real life.
Modular writing isn’t exactly something everyone has contact with, so today I’m going to talk a bit about my workflow and how exactly I handle the issue of designing and executing my grammars.
To be honest, most people will have no use for this, even most instances of modular writing don’t go this far off the deep end of things.
Took me a while to get back to this, didn’t it? Well, let’s ramble on some more about building conversations. I’d like to focus on the various building blocks from which branching, node-based conversations are made from.
This is not a full taxonomy, but I think every other case one can think of can be constructed from the parts presented here. And if you disagree or have some pattern you want to mention, I’d like to hear about it.
Esoteric Musings... 