03/04/16- Blogwk6

Blog
Week; 6
Game: Wing Commander 3
Q: How is narrative developed through character interactions?


Characters and how they push the narrative along in any form of media including games is becoming increasingly more important as the quality of games increases. For example 'The Walking Dead' series relies on how the characters interact with each other to form the story. I thought that this was very similar with 'Wing Commander 3'. The difference between these two is the 'The Walking Dead' gives you a much more vast selection with which you decide what your character does ion the game giving them a similar identity. But in many video games "character may take on strong, fictional identities that are recognizably separate from those of their players." Because 'Wing Commander' is all acted with little input from the player the characters performance is almost set in stone making the character interactions, I thought, so much more important for pushing the narrative along. As you follow Mark Hamill's character around the rooms of the ship we get to select who and what he interacts with. I felt that you had no choice but to interact with the other character sin the available conversations, which further validates my point about interactions being so much more important in this type of game. When your characters interact in this game it does occasionally give you an two choices of dialogue to reply to a question asked by the other person. This does offer some variation to the interaction. However as far as the greater game goes I feel that this does not have an overwhelming impact on how it plays out as the set in stone dialogue seems to be the driving force of the story.