a everyone um how's it going
so okay basically could talk about
narrative and try and provide us a
summary or a kind of insight into
narrative in games obviously narrative
is a pretty huge topic so I'm not going
to be able to go over the whole history
of narrative and narrative theory and
everything so I'm going to look at a
specific article that I find really
inspiring which is called game designers
narrative architecture by Henry Jenkins
and I'm going to apply that to
blood-borne some we use blood-borne as
an example of what he's talking about
because blood-borne is just a really
great game and I think it tells its
story in a really interesting way
everyone hear me okay by the way yeah
cool okay so um it's a great opening
slide and that the image is courtesy of
solo who's a has it his tumblr page
there
okay sunshine that dr. tom blow calm and
I used that which is good so a little
bit about me and my research I'm
currently writing a PhD in titled
ludonarrative convergence a study of
narrative development in recent video
games across reception production and
player contexts so we're playing out
here that academics and game designers
share a love for the colon so that's
something that we all have in common
I'm interested in production studies and
building bridges between academic
humanities Department and the industry
so part of my PhD is about interviewing
game designers about their kind of
practices of kind of you know
implementing narrative in their games
I'm interested in raising the profile of
video games as a valuable object of
study within humanities which is why me
and Tom organized this day of talks and
I'm interested in exploring how
narrative and
ludecke gameplay elements of games can
work together to create meaningful and
original narrative experiences so in
kind of video games there's generally
seen a conflict between a story and
gameplay and so this is summed up quite
nicely by this quotes by Greg Costigan I
hope I've pronounced his name correctly
I probably haven't so there's a direct
and immediate conflict between the
demands of a story and the demands of a
game diverging from a story's path is
likely to make for a less satisfying
story restricting a player's freedom of
action is likely to make for a less
satisfying game so these things are
often seen as in tension and in terms in
the academic field of game studies which
isn't exactly like game design that you
might be familiar with game studies kind
of a discourse that kind of is has been
trying to establish itself for a long
time within the humanities departments
and they've largely or have
traditionally split into two camps this
is one of the big debates in game
studies is lewd ology versus narratology
so a typical neurologists position is
that computer games and not narratives
rather than narrative tends to be
isolated from or even work against the
computer gamers of the game that's
Jesper Juul who's like a leading narrow
lead ologist and a typical narrow
colleges position is about Janet Marie
and she talks about which comes first
the story or the game for me it's always
the story that comes first because
storytelling is a core human activity
one that we take into every medium of
expression from the aural formulaic to
the digital multimedia so lewd ologists
are very much about moving on and
looking at games specifically for their
unique interactions and don't want to
know about narrative in their most
extreme state and narratology
are a bit more interested in narrative
and disc reiated a bit of tension so
things got a little heated so in an
article game studies org which is one of
the leading journals on gay
studies mark o/s : and said in his
article the gaming situation he wants to
annihilate for good the discussion of
games as stories narratives or cinema in
this scenario stories are just
uninteresting ornaments or gift
wrappings to games and laying any
emphasis on studying these kinds of
marketing tools is just a waste of time
and energy so for him narrative is just
a marketing tool which is a sick burn
for the narratology
out there and demonstrates I think that
academics can also enter into flame wars
so enter Henry Jenkins is like a hero of
mine and so he wrote this essay game
designers narrative architecture and one
of the reasons I love this so much is
it's a kind of a fairly early attempt to
kind of build a bridge between these two
positions so he says in this short piece
I hope to offer a middle ground position
between the lewd ologist and meratol
adjusts one that respects the
particularity of this emerging medium
examining game's lesser stories than a
spaces right with narrative possibility
so I'm going to explore this essay in
relation to blood-borne so he encourages
us to think about games in less
reductive ways okay a game story telling
in this reductive ways and this is some
of the problems he has with the lewd
ologists view of narrative so I think
they have too limited a conception of
narrative based on classical linear
storytelling rather than more
experimental forms he thinks they have
too limited a conception of narration
focusing on the work of the author
rather than the process of narrative
comprehension so the experience of
actually reading the thing and he asked
whether games and their entirety of
stories rather than and they sorry they
asked whether games in their entirety
are stories rather than whether
narrative enters a game a more localized
level which he argues and finally they
assume that stories are self-contained
rather than serving some specific
functions within a new transmedia
storytelling environment just something
I'll touch on again in a minute
so there isn't as much a big divide
between video games
literary tradition as you might think
Jenkins suggests there's a link between
spatial stories of videogames and older
forms of stories having like the hero's
Odyssey quest myths and travel writing
the notion of the monomyth was put
forward by Joseph Campbell in his book
the hero with a thousand faces which is
really famous had a huge influence on
things like Star Wars and has a huge
influence on game does game designers
and game critics Mary Lou Ryan's book
narrative as virtual reality makes the
case for games as building on notions of
immersion and interactivity that always
been a concern of literature so those
are the two big things that are always
talked about in relation to games and
she says no they've been there all along
they're just more intensified or
slightly different in games and James
Newman uses em4 stirs notion of flat and
round characters to explore how
characters and video games are typically
defined by their functions and abilities
so it's kind of like a wealth of
thinking about games using kind of more
literary theories and literary theories
can be very systematic and we all know
how game designers love systems so
there's a bit of commonality there so
Jenkins wants us to think about games of
spatial stories so he says game
designers don't simply tell stories they
design worlds and sculpt spaces so
considering what ways the structuring of
game space facilitates different kinds
of narrative experiences so the work the
designer does anticipates different
narrative experiences for the player
he's enough he also says though that
games are a bit different to traditional
stories and there's a tendency to
dismiss games as as not an expressive
medium because they're perceived to have
overly simplistic storytelling but as
Jenkins suggests spatial stories are not
badly constructed stories rather they're
stories that respond to alternative
aesthetic principles privileging spatial
exploration / plot development spatial
stories are held together by broadly
defined goals and conflicts and pushed
forward by the characters movement
across the map
so let's move on to blood-borne what is
it just briefly you probably all know
what it is Japanese action role-playing
game released in 2015 on PlayStation 4
developed by from software and published
by Bandai Namco is the spiritual
successor to the soul series which
includes Demon Souls and Dark Souls 1 2
and almost 3 is coming out soon and
we're looking forward to that
the lead designer is hitter taka
Miyazaki and he's very much considered
the creative force behind the game and
has I guess the privileged position of
being like an author within the
commercial games industry on YouTube
there's dozens dozens and dozens of
videos exploring the law of blood-borne
which is something that I'm going to
touch on a bit in this talk and I think
in quite interesting ways so his a few
of the youtubers who are engaged and
that kind of stuff to introduce the game
and this kind of thinking about I'm
going to use a video by Fatih Vidya
which is a disss or extract looking at
some of the lore of the game think on
human history imagine if in any era a
church was founded that had access to a
substance that could cure any illness
imagine if this church gave it freely to
a city how powerful that city would
become and how powerful the church would
become within it this is exactly what
happened in the Arnim people came far
and wide to be treated with the
miraculous blood of the gods and the
people of yharnam put their faith in the
healing church in fact what happened in
yharnam is eerily similar to what
happened in the tombs deep below where
the blood was originally found and as
you know many chalice dungeons
especially those of lauren are now
overrun by horrific beasts the lower
laron chalice states there are trace
remains of medical procedures in parts
of ailing Leron whether these were
attempts to control the scourge of the
beast or the cause of the outbreak is
unknown
the ailing LaRon chalice states the
tragedy that struck this ailing land of
LaRon is said to have its root in the
scourge of the beasts some have made the
dreaded extrapolation that yharnam may
be next Yanam was next through overuse
of the healing blood the city would
eventually succumb to the scourge of the
beast until then though Lawrence and the
healing church managed to grow in power
with the miraculous healing properties
of their special yet infected blood okay
so I think I think what that video
demonstrates is um blood-borne doesn't
go to any trouble to make its meaning
clear though that meaning is always
tantalizing which has resulted in
hundreds of deeply analytical RT
articles and videos on YouTube so this
video is a good example of the kind of
close textual analysis and use of
sources that we might expect in academia
which leads me to speculate that the
majority of the scholarly activity
around such games occurs in the fan
space Henry Jenkins has also been a key
figure writing about fan studies and if
you want to find out more about that and
what he believes the value of fan
discourses are to academia you can read
his book textual poachers or mat hills
book fan cultures very interesting so
Jenkins talks about four modes of
spatial storytelling and they will begin
with ease I've called them the for ease
of spatial storytelling so they evoke
enact in bed and have emergent
narratives and we're going to go through
each of those in relation to blood-borne
so it's sold with the evocative
narrative so Jenkins says such works do
not so much tell self-contained stories
as draw upon or pre-existing narrative
narrative competencies games can be
based on licenses they can rely on
genre conventions they can recreate
events they can evoke other works
through a process called intersexuality
it's basically just having one text have
a relationship to the other support for
it he talks about this occurring in
process that he's written extensively
about called transmen
storytelling so increasingly we inhabit
a world of transmedia storytelling one
that depends less on each individual
work being self-sufficient than on each
work contributing to a larger narrative
economy so for example the Star Wars
game may not simply retell the story of
Star Wars but it doesn't have to do in
order to enrich or expand or experience
the Star Wars saga so this is this is a
British daughter of the cosmos
so I actually recommend this slide to be
more of a surprise I should have read a
little bit more but basically so in
blood-borne you're a hunter on the night
of the hunt and you find yourself
cleansing the ruined streets of yharnam
of werewolves and other creatures so
this setting and its antagonists are
common tropes of gothic horror
eventually though you start facing
enemies that bear similarities with the
creatures in love cross Lovecraft's
Cthulhu Mythos hold on like a breeches
daughter of the cosmos everyone acts
surprised because I should have done
that just now sorry
so it's got tentacles and it's got an
unpronounceable name and that's not just
because it's in the Japanese slide so it
must be a reference to Lovecraft I'm
guessing so although it avoid though the
gamer avoids referencing Lovecraft
directly many have noticed at the close
comparison between her twisted creatures
and locations in the game and
Lovecraftian stories such as the dream
quest of unknown Kadath so whilst
blood-borne begins by evoking the gothic
horror it makes a transition into the
specific world of HP Lovecraft's notion
of cosmic horror and the only clue to
this early on is this incomprehensible
start on your stat sheet that's like Oh
strength against skin what does that
mean no idea so that the game does drop
little hints early on so cosmic horror
is based on Lovecraft's existential
worldview in which humanity is powerless
in the face of an indifferent universe
devoid of God and incomprehensibly
infinite so there's a little quote there
from him the basis of all true cosmic
horror is violation of
of nature and the profoundest violations
are always at least concrete and
describable like that there's another
good quote from Lovecraft which really
sums up this position I won't read Oh
have a little read if you feel like it
he's not a happy chap
so it's interesting here though that he
talks about one of his big themes is
people wanting knowledge and like
scientists trying to gain knowledge and
going mad for kind of discovering things
that they can't understand with their
puny human brains and essentially that's
the plot of blood-borne because the
founding of the healing Church of
yharnam is a result of academics playing
around with forces beyond their
comprehension they go to the chalice
demons they find the blood of the great
ones they start using it everything goes
to hell basically so um to talk about
briefly about a little mechanic in the
game which is the insight mechanic where
basically your knowledge of the world is
trapped in the form of insight which is
rewarded each time you first encounter
or beat a boss and and so there's this
sense that the more horrific things you
see in the game the more insight you
have in the world and in true love
crafty and fashion this allows you to
start seeing things that you couldn't
see before
so this chat up here amygdala or Amy as
I like to call her is these guys have
been hanging around on the buildings in
blood-borne all the time and you know
that they've been there even though you
can't see them because if you're unlucky
enough to go by one of them it will pick
you up and kill you and you won't know
why so I think it's interesting that as
a system in the game that tracks your
knowledge and changes the game based on
that knowledge actually makes the game
harder in some areas as well it changes
enemy attacks and things and amigdala is
also a part of the brain which is
associated with knowledge and emotional
reactions to things so I think there's a
a direct like thematic link there I know
what that was we carry on so moving on
so the evocative narrative of
blood-borne is
it's Lovecraftian kind of homage I guess
so moving on to the idea of an enacted
narrative Jenkins noticed that games
enable players to perform or witness
narrative events so narrative enters the
game on two levels in terms of broadly
defined goals or conflicts and on the
level of localized incidents in terms of
broadly defined goals
the player often has a quest that drives
them forward although in blood-borne you
eventually discover that you've been
manipulated by a great one all along
sorry spoilers that's another thing
academics like to do is give away the
ending of things so the organization of
the plot becomes a matter of designing
the geography of imaginary worlds so
that obstacles thought and affordances
facilitate the protagonist forward
movement towards resolution in
blood-borne the architecture conspires
to channel players towards encounters
that have been specifically designed to
challenge them a good example is the
sequence in old yharnam where the player
traverses in a series of ruined
buildings whilst under fire from a
hunter by the name of juror if you
approach him from a different direction
he's not hostile and actually speaks to
you about why he is protecting the
beasts in the area so this idea that
Jake Jenkins talks about that games have
an accordion like structures there's
certain plot points that are fixed
whereas other moments can be contracted
and expanded and moved around so in
terms of enacting narratives that
there's a lot about the kind of
geographical layer of space so in
blood-borne the layout of space allows
for the inclusion of shortcuts that
allow players to return quickly to
previous areas there's an excellent
video on Eurogamer actually about the
doors in blood-borne and how frightening
it is when you can open a door because
the game wants you to progress and kill
you um and doors that you can't open
like are likely to be shortcuts that you
need to find the other entrance war and
this map I think shows how everything
links up in a really into
stay away and this map is a bit more of
a artistic impression of those linkages
references at the bottom if you want to
see who made them and this is more of a
kind of flow chart of your progression
through the game I think it's
interesting to point out at this point
that there isn't actually a map that
exists in the game so all of these
wonderful things have been created by
the fan base which i think is great and
Henry Jenkins has written elsewhere that
defining quality of place relationship
to a game is the mastery of space and I
think this is a good example of that
and here's another map which is a little
bit more more simple but at the same
time complicated because it's kind of
charting your narrative progression
through the game in a spatial way so I
think it's interesting that you can
think about the narrative as a series of
triggers in a spatial sense and you
could almost map this onto this so that
a narrative and space work together
that's a good example of that but blood
Jenkins always also talks about micro
narratives so these are narrative that
enters the game on the on like a kind of
local level on a kind of more specific
level and is more self-contained so he
uses the example of attractions in
pioneering Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein's films and particularly his
film Battleship Potemkin so Eisenstein
used the word attractions broadly to
describe any element within a world work
that produces a profound emotional
impact and theorized that the themes of
the work could be communicated across
and through these discrete elements so
here's a few shots from battleship
potemkin here's the steps the OD this is
the Odessa steps sequence so this is
like the Tsar's army shooting upon the
peasantry which supposed to be sparked
or for the communist revolution it's a
kind of propaganda film but it's
interesting because it's the very early
days of film this was the guy who
created film editing
basically and within this one big
contested space like Henry Jenkins talks
about this as a contested space just
like in the video game you have all of
these little stories happening
the soldiers marching forward and firing
a pram rolling down the stairs after the
mother is killed someone who's calling
for peace getting shot there's a few
other little narratives and he talks
about these as micro narratives
something that's a useful way to think
about them so we have micro narrative as
cutscene so Henry Jenkins talks about
how these can often be cutscenes and
games these micro narratives but they
don't have to be and I think is
interesting that there's only one
significant cutscene in blood-borne and
it's when you touch Lawrence's skull and
they then see a flashback to William and
Lawrence having their falling out which
led to the creation of the healing
church as a really significant moment
and it's narratively motivated as well
so it's not I don't think a
hard-and-fast cutscene it's basically
like you're seeing what the character
sees at that point because his knowledge
is is coming from the skull and is
seeing a historical event play out and
and it's got an important bit of
information in it as well right it's got
a password that you need to progress
through the game so it's incredibly
Lingus of progression
there's also micro narrative as soy
quest I think so there's lots of side
quests in blood-borne their focus on
different interesting little side
characters and you have to trigger them
in very specific ways being at the right
place to open to the right people at the
right time
Eileen the crow is a good example I
think she very so
she tracks down hunters who have been
corrupted and have become blood-drunk
and you must speak to her at specific
moments and locations to continue her
quest including two occasions where you
have to help her kill their quarry in
very difficult fights furthermore it's
possible for her to become blood drunk
herself causing the player to fight her
in a
particularly tragic ending to her story
so this incredibly nuanced little story
more than any other in the game asks you
to question the morality of the hunt and
sprinkles a much needed touch of
humanity into the world but it's well
hidden and might play out very
differently from play as a player I
think it's a good example of what
Jenkins refers to as a micro narrative
because it's self-contained independent
from the larger plot and occurs on a
very personal level it's also indicative
of the incredible variability that can
be built into videogame stories and how
their outcomes and meanings can change
based on player choices actions and
other hidden triggers which makes them a
fascinating but difficult object of
study for academics moving on to
embedded narratives so in literary
studies the russian formalists made a
distinction between two different
aspects of narrative story and plot this
is a classic distinction so plot is the
way the work is presented on the page in
literature the way you read it where a
story is the actual chronological
sequence and reading is an act of
chronologically reassembling what you're
reading so the classic example was the
detective novel where you have two
stories somewhat Aeneas Lee the story of
the crime which is unknown at the start
and the story of the investigator which
you as a reader are mirror mirroring his
efforts are kind of like reassembling
the chronological sequence of the story
so according to Jenkins the does game
designer creates two different
narratives one relatively unstructured
and controlled by the player as they
explore the game space and unlock its
secrets the other pre structured but
embedded within the meson son awaiting
discovery the game world becomes a kind
of information space and memory palace I
really like this idea of games as a
memory palace it's like one of my
favorite quotes so I think though
there's a challenge of reconstructing
the story from plot in a game on two
levels which is a little bit different
to literature so firstly the game
resists your efforts to read it or
throwing challenges at you that you must
overcome in your quest for meaning as
jenkins says embedded narrative Canon
often does occur within contested spaces
secondly the story elements once
discovered must be mentally reassembled
to create a narrative pattern which is
close to the process of reading as the
process in literary studies and
philosophy called hermeneutics shouldn't
go into okay so that's an active
narrative so moving on to the final
category sorry not the final category
know that this finds some still the same
thing yeah yeah embedded narrative sorry
I've lost myself anyway so embedded
narratives in blood-borne so Jenkins
talks about embedded narratives don't
require branching story structures but
rather depend on scrambling the pieces
of linear story and allowing us to
reconstruct the plot through the acts of
detection speculation exploration and
decryption so in blood-borne a lot of
the plot is written into item
descriptions dialogue of hidden NPCs and
into the very architecture of the game
world itself here's an example the
yharnam stone which you gain from
defeating the two marion queen after a
very long
she's an optional boss in a very long
run of the chalice dungeons which
incredibly difficult to be and for ages
people were trying to figure out what
this did and it turned out it didn't do
anything it was just there to deliver
its little payload of narrative and be
really enigmatic basically it's if you
read the description it's the Queen lies
dead but her horrific consciousness is
only asleep and stirs in unsettling
motions and the item looks a bit like
it's got fetus kind of thing in it which
is a bit weird so I like to think of
this quality of video game storytelling
as dispersed narrative where the
narrative is just scattered around all
over the place and you have to kind of
go around and pick it up and put it back
together which I really like in games so
the final category is emergent narrative
so emergent narratives are not pretty
structured or pre-programmed taking
shape through the game
play yet they are not as unstructured
chaotic and frustrating as life itself
so they're kind of unpredictable within
limits so there are those stories that
occur through the partially
unpredictable interaction of players and
systems basically so the more systems a
game has the more opportunities there
are for emergent storytelling yet these
systems are designed to create certain
types of gameplay just as architecture
anticipates certain uses and
interactions so these are known as
affordances and Jenkins uses the example
of urban design so urban designers exert
even less control than game designers
over how people use the space as they
create or what kind of scenes they
staged there yet some kinds of expand
themselves more readily to narratively
memorable or emotionally meaningful
experiences than others so you can talk
about emergent narrative and blood-borne
I think one of the most interesting
elements is the online functionality of
the game which is like the Dark Souls
games before it quite interesting quite
a symmetric quite different to any other
game so in blood-borne players can leave
messages for one another which are
relayed into other players games by
interdimensional messengers these cute
little guys which I love and you can
give them top hats so that makes me
happy and players can also activate
blood spots that mark where other
players fell in battle to play a
silhouette of that players last moments
potentially offering an insight into
what lays ahead it's an example of that
there and you can most importantly ring
a little bell to summon other players
into your game to help you out or to
invade other players games and and not
leave them basically so there's that
element of kind of emergence there were
players interacting together and being
able to help each other out create their
own stories within the limits of the
game I think it's interesting that
whereas most games would put all of this
online function entities where it's like
choose to go online it's all there
within the narrative context of the game
you're ringing a bell
because blood-borne operates on a
parallel you
verse mechanic whether the sound of the
Bell creates a tumbler that kind of
links to the other players worlds and
cools them forth and it's all really
interesting here's a another picture so
many good pictures from blood-borne so
another aspect of the emerging behavior
relation to blood-borne is the fact that
this system has actually elevated itself
from out of the game and now and play is
kind of like trade information on wiki's
and using YouTube videos to try and
interpret the lore of the game to give
one another advice and I think that the
game creates a really positive
collaborative environment and and that's
a product of the way it's designed and
it's worth noting as well that such
emergent narrative elements based on
online interaction are completely
dependent on active servers and multiple
players experiencing the game
simultaneously so this type of narrative
interaction is perhaps the most unique
to video games and the most ephemeral
because it's based on things outside of
the game itself which i think is
something to bear in mind if you're
going to pull Gooding this talk later
which is about the preservation of such
games so why is all this important
I hope this talk offered an insight into
how narrative and gameplay can work
together and demonstrate how interesting
it is to think of game designers as a
narrative architects rather the
traditional storytellers I think
thinking of video games storytelling in
spatial terms using these four different
models presented by Henry Jenkins could
lead to more creative narratives so
jenkins says such a mixture of in
accident and embedded narrative elements
can allow for balance between the
flexibility of interactivity and the
coherence of pre authored narrative so
thus bringing together narratology and
lewd ology and there's an academic
that's pretty much here there's some
work cited there's a little bit about me
there's time for questions if anyone
wants to ask skinny you'll have to shout
them out and I'll have to repeat them
any questions well then there are plenty
of videos online for you to look at
yeah
yeah yeah okay just to reiterate for the
video in case that wasn't picked up how
how specific can you go with micro
narratives is a little kind of tableau
in a corner of a room a micro narrative
and is any action a player takes through
space in a sequence a micro narrative it
could be like Jenkins gives the example
of like playing a football game and
giving a getting a touchdown as being a
micro narrative because it's something
that you can lift out of context and you
know have it as a self-contained little
thing and I think totally those little
bits of environmental storytelling where
you get a little tableau almost or still
like you said a still-life can totally
be like a micro narrative so I don't
think there's any hard and fast rule to
it I just think it's a really
interesting way to frame those kind of
things but yeah I mean the problem with
these kind of taxonomy is right is they
create divisions between things whereas
actually I think there's quite a lot of
overlap between these four categories
obviously I can't go into that because
20 minutes is enough to just think of a
taste of always talking about rather
than actually you know explore how
they're interconnected as well any other
questions
yeah
big influence
okay cool so the question is like about
kind of Lovecraft being used more and
more and what other kind of originators
of kind of genres and and tropes can be
used or are being used I think it's
interesting that blood that kind of love
craft is such a popular thing for the
bass games on and things you can't
actually throw a rock I don't know why
you'd be throwing rock we can't throw a
rock these days without hitting the
board game with a Lovecraftian theme
right and the main reason for that is it
cool but the secondary and
closely-related reason to that is it's
um isn't it's out of copyright so anyone
can just use it and so I think like the
more it's then used like the more people
become familiar with it and the more it
gets used but I think the interesting
thing with blood-borne is it doesn't
explicitly use it it's all very subtle
is like Miyazaki's use of kind of
western fantasy tropes in Dark Souls
they're there but they're kind of
filtered through his kind of unique
sensibilities and his kind of cultural
influences and he uses I can't remember
the terminology now but his specifically
said that he uses a lot of Japanese
philosophical concepts about
impermanence which is really interesting
it's really interesting to read
interviews with him because he clearly
you know is very intelligent man and
clip who knows what he's doing and I
think in terms of other kind of
originators of important myth AUSA's I
guess Sherlock Holmes like you know I
think Arthur Conan Doyle his his work
gets used a lot and is being used more
and more in videogames I think is
another interesting talk to be had about
because I mentioned a little bit there
about kind of detective fiction and
videogames because obviously detective
fiction is a really good example of how
story and plot works but it's a little
bit harder to do in videogames and when
videogames normally do detective stories
because they could be so procedural it
can easily get out of hand
be difficult they normally kind of
systemize that so you had something like
murdered soul suspect where you weren't
really solving a mystery were just
collecting little bits of things and
putting them together and it's I'm yet
to see like a detective game done really
well I think that gives that the player
the freedom to try and work it out
itself but that's the other one I could
think of is at the top of my head is
Sherlock Holmes and do you have any in
mind yeah another one
I'll give you which is a little bit more
highbrow but I think does creep into
things is George annuity of all gays who
is an Argentinean a proto sci-fi writer
he came up with some amazing incredible
mind-blowing ideas that play that you
know you read one of his stories and it
will change the way that you look at the
world forever his brilliant and I find
I'm finding that his ideas are creeping
into games and popular culture a little
bit more now
try I can't think of an example for the
top of my head but could you think of
one cool I know you like tall guys as
well oh yeah he's that oh yeah joseph
conrad's yeah
spec up to the line yes spec up the line
is an adaptation of the heart of
darkness by Joseph Conrad yeah yeah yeah
videogames are becoming a little bit
more literary and a little bit more you
know encouraged to kind of like newest
literary sources and and play around
with them good anyone else probably try
and wrap up time as its yes okay we
should probably wrap up but I hope you
enjoyed that and it wasn't it was okay
you