Fantasy Authors Use Existing Cultures for Easy Consistency

Inconsistencies in any fictional world can be jarring to audiences and detract from the narrative; “lacking consistency, a world may begin to appear sloppily constructed, or even random and disconnected.”58 Since Secondary Worlds are increasingly likely to be inconsistent as they grow in size and scope, analogies to the real world are particularly useful to Fantasy authors because they provide a template in which not every detail needs to be either imagined or explained to the audience. G...

 Riddles Present New Ways of Looking at Things

The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996), It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our...

 Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"

A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ ...

 Amorality in Games and Discovering the Algorithm

The rules of Vice City call for a vast accumulation of cash, cars and cronies, of weapons and real estate. Most of these activities are outside the law, but law is just part of a larger algorithm. In any case, the story and the art are arbitrary, mere decoration. If in utopia, everything is subordinated to a rigorous description, a marking of space with signs, in atopia, nothing matters but the transitive relations between variables. The artful surfaces of the game are just a way for the game...

 RPG as Theater, Storytelling, and Game

A roleplaying game is part improvisational theater, part storytelling, and part game. It is played by a gamemaster who runs the game and a group of players who pretend to be characters. These characters are created by the players, given a history and personality, and then further defined by a set of statistics that represent the character’s skills and attributes as developed in the character creation process (see Creating a Shadowrunner, p. 80). The gamemaster presents the setting and situa...

 Vampire RPG Focus on Storytelling

Storytelling is the focus of this book. It is also thewhole point of the Vampire game. But what exactly is Storytelling?There are two trite answers to this question: Storytelling is what Storytellersdo, and Read this book and find out.. Both are true, but neitheris particularly helpful. Storytelling is what Storytellers do. In Vampire,the Storyteller creates and presents Stories in which the players participatethrough the control of their characters. The result is an interactive typeof story...