Tuesday, November 1, 2011

It's Morfin' Time!

Excuse the Power Rangers reference - I just felt it fit the mood.As you may have noticed if you visit the site, I haven't written in a while. This was intentional. While writing up a piece about Deus Ex: Human Revolution I suddenly understood something: what I really care about in games is their stories.

Then I noticed that while there are a lot of blogs and websites about people playing games and talking about them - there aren't many sites devoted to discussing and dissecting games stories. In fact, most people's idea of what constitutes a good game story seems to be quite different than my own.

When I started this blog I said that the reason I did it was that I hadn't seen enough of my own opinions voiced in gaming journalism. This is still true, and I feel it mostly when it comes to narratives. Games journalists seem to dismiss them most of the time, or at least always opt for narrative-eschewing sandbox games. Even if they like stories, they prefer their stories to have 'choice'. That is, not a real narrative at all but an excuse for the player to make a fake decision, devoid of meaning.

Pondering this, I realized what I had to do. I'm going to close this blog and make a new one that is devoted to game narratives: exploring them, discussing them, analyzing them. Not just the stories, but their connection to the gameplay; how the game's interactivity expressses the narrative, how they combine. Of course, being a gaming blog I will discuss anything that seems important to me at a time, but it will mostly be about game stories. The blog will be called Gamesreader - as in reading into games. The blog is already up here. There might not be anything there yet when you click the link, but there will be.

I'm truly excited about this, as much as I was when I started this blog. As opposed to a general Pc gaming blog, there virtually is no site dedicated to exploring how we tell stories in games. Stories always take a backseat it seems. I hope I'll be able to get a following and show that game narratives matter!

If you've been reading this blog, thank you very much and I hope you'll join me in my new one.