Gameplay Through Visual Communication - Environmental Narrative
Today we worked on adding assets that tell the game's story using visual communication. The narrative we need to tell must also tie in with the dialog being read by the main character. This will happen all throughout the game but we started with level two at the location where the following line is read:
"One snoot full is all anyone needs before an overwhelming urge to sanitize them with bullets kicks in."
To visualize this rather crude joke and drive home its horrific meaning in real life terms, the art director created an image of a statute, some leader for the enemy, where the statue is covered with unexploded missiles.
This may appear subtle but this technique is our attempt to use symbolism. I researched this topic using Christopher Totten's book on Architectural concepts, I found the following passage on "Advertising Methods". It reads:
In a sense we are "advertising" a concept: War, death, destruction. Oh my! Further, Totten talks about how this symbolic advertising (symbolic concept of narrative storytelling) is referred to as "Environmental Narrative. The following passage talks about this.
Further on this point, Totten talks about the advertising methods explained by "Bogost" (from his book, Persuasive Games) where Visual Rhetoric is discussed in terms of Associative Advertising:
To explore this further, we will need to look at Persuasive Games, but there is this from the introduction:
The above is actually quite meaningful to this game. The reason is this. Telling a strong narrative in games is considered quite hard if not almost impossible. Most game designers fail at it. And even those games with very good stories, often tell it in the most obtuse way possible. Of course, you can leave all sorts of artifacts in the game for people to read or listen too, like pop up boxes in Deus Ex. but these methods are at odds with the ability of the player to have fun and learn the story via procedural rhetoric. In our game, the idea is to do all three at the same time. Play the game while having some narration, further reinforced by visual symbols that drive home the emotional meaning of the narrative. With well placed environmental images, we hope to achieve a greater sense of "Environmental Narrative".
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