This week in class we starting talking about our stories and how we must choose the best media to tell the story. What it boiled down to was:

• Write down the experience that we want the audience to have from interacting with our story.
• Figure out how to tell the story: there is no such thing as an original idea, but it is in the relaying of the story that originality comes to fore. Our story will either copy, transfer or combine. We need to adapt to whatever we wrote in step one.

It’s funny because I never really thought of video games as platforms for story telling, but then I realised that they actually were. In class, Dan mentioned the video game The Last of Us which I absolutely loved playing. We discussed how it is intact a linear story: the player doesn’t get to choose the race and gender of the character they play, but we are subsequently drawn into the character no matter who it is. The story is intense, and as a player, we are challenged and rewarded at specific times. The game designers had orchestrated exactly what motive the player would have, and what they wanted the audience to get out of the story. The Last of Us in no way is an original story – a post-apocalyptic, zombie-like infested world is by no means original, but The Last of Us is a remix of some of the best concepts taken from other quality video games. And it has a very clear narrative. Even the trailer for the video game has elements of a cinematic experience that you would get from a film:

Another interesting point that relates to Robert McKee’s reading ‘The Substance of a Story’ and Andrew Stanton’s Ted Talk is summed up in the following meme:

…yet I still enjoyed this game immensely. Go figure.

Another way in which The Last of Us ties into our discussion on transmedia, nuggets and push-off points, is the extra extended material which surrounds this video game. There is an additional story which can be downloaded for an extra 2 hours of game play. It provides context for Ellie’s past. Whilst this is the same media as the video game, it plays on the idea that if audiences are interested enough, they will go looking for the extra material and extended story lines which may not have been included in the main narrative.

Another example of this which we looked at in class was in the case of The Matrix. When I first watched this film nearly 10 years ago, I was 11 and didn’t understand what the hell was going on. And frankly, I wasn’t a fan of sci-fi back then, and so I found the whole concept too outlandish to deal with. In class, we watched The Second Renaissance, Parts I + II which shed some light on what actually happened before the time frame of The Matrix – in essence, it was a prequel which gave a deeper insight into the reign of the machines. I never knew these short films existed, and without them, perhaps I never would have revisited The Matrix as I did after class. With the background knowledge provided from these two short films, I enjoyed The Matrix a whole lot more than I did the first time. I’m sure though, people older than I was when I first watched the film (and people with a higher attention span) wouldn’t have needed these short films to enjoy The Matrix, but their existence adds to the excitement and hype around the film.