![]() ![]() Secondly, it was the idea of just how abstract and problematic you could make a story and retain it being this engaging experience. So you have nothing but story to keep a player engaged – is that possible? What kind of experience does that leave? What does the space you free up by losing all those gameplay mechanisms and activities allow you to do? The basic idea came from this question about what happens when you ditch traditional gameplay out of an FPS space and what that leaves you. I won’t go into that here, but there’s a lot more info at Where did the idea for Dear Esther come from? In my other major strand, I’m involved in game preservation, mainly through a big European project called KEEP, which is developing this emulation architecture that you’ll be able to plug all kinds of existing emulators into to run obsolete titles. That’s the real impetus behind thechineseroom. So what do you do? Forget them, or theorise about them without any real evidence to back up your ideas? Or you can get on with it and build them yourself. The research mods spin out of this: basically, there are questions about games you just can’t answer by looking at commercial titles, but they are really important questions nonetheless. ![]() I spent the last four years doing a big analysis of major FPS titles of the last ten years, looking at their worlds, agents, avatars and plots to back that up. When story and gameplay bang up against each other, to me that’s just bad design, not a fundamental incompatibility. There’s a lot of historical antagonism between the two and I don’t agree with that. I’ve just completed a doctorate on that, looking specifically at how story functions as a gameplay device. Firstly, I study first-person gaming, particularly the relationship between game content and gameplay. I teach games and interactive media, but spend most of my time now on the research side of things. (You can get a brief view of what the mod looks and sounds like by checking out a YouTube gameplay video, but try not to spoil it for yourself.)Ĭan you explain a little about yourself and what you do?ĭan Pinchbeck: I’m a researcher and lecturer based at the University of Portsmouth, UK. It takes about 30 minutes to play through, and it is absolutely, entirely worth it. ![]() I'm of the firm belief that it's a large step forward in game narration, finally moving beyond feeding us cutscenes and expository dialogue.īefore you read the interview, be aware that there are what could be considered small SPOILERS below, and so, I urge you very, very strongly to go download Dear Esther, play it (it required Half Life 2), then come back. It's hard to describe Dear Esther without ruining it, and even then it's difficult to put it into words. It wasn't until Lewis Denby's piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun arrived that I finally downloaded it and played through. I never really took the plunge, though, waiting until the reports of invisible holes in the maps and ways to break the mod were all ironed out. It sounded incredibly interesting you are left on an island in the Hebradian range, with a nameless narrator and what is supposedly a ghost story. I've had Dear Esther on my radar for a while.
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