James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by James Wallis.
"In the ongoing debates about storytelling and narrative in games, the various commentators often overlook a key point: even in the most cutting-edge examples of the state of the art, it is not the players who tell the story, it is the game. Whether computer games with a narrative element, board games, card games, or face-to-face role-playing games, the essential plot and structure of the narrative is predetermined before the game begins, and cannot be altered."
"Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them, but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story."
"the game's mechanics must take into consideration the rules of the genre that it is trying to create: not just the relevant icons and tropes, but the nature of a story from that genre. A fairy tale has a very different structure and set of requirements than a horror story or a soap opera, and a game must work to replicate that. "
"In most games, the structure is simply the way the game is played. In story-making games, it is also the principal way that the narrative shape of the story is formed (...)."
"Structure is not the same thing as rules. (...) That's how the game plays. It's not how the game works."
"The key to a successful story-making game, at least in the ones that have been released so far, is simplicity of design. (...) it does mean that rules have to be integrated with structure and genre to form a coherent package. I am a self-confessed proponent of "elegance through simplicity" in game design, and I realize that this doesn't fit every taste, or every style of game. "
All quotes were directly pulled out of the essay.
TXTual Healing was created in the early days of 2006 by Paul Notzold and has become an ongoing exploration in how mobile technology can transform public action into theater. Using a laptop and projector, speech balloons and/or graphic context are projected onto buildings, with a phone number to which anyone with a mobile phone can text a response. Typically a private form of communication, in this project text messaging becomes an open, anonymous, and uncensored dialogue; a means to engage, rather than to escape. A way to create community through spontaneous performance.
TXTual Healing contextualizes text messaging into user generated story telling, whether in public space or as an indoor installation. Projects include displaying text messages in speech bubbles pairing them with graphic content, writing messages out in the hand of graffiti artists, interactive movies where the audience text’s the dialog and triggers the movie to play forward, mixed media pieces using permanent graphics with projected messages, and live performance pieces such as freestyle rapping your text messages.
(Source: http://www.txtualhealing.com/ About Page)
In the hypertext story La hermandad de los escribanos the reader becomes the main character. The story is in a folder that can be directly downloaded from the website. A fraternity founded in the Middle Ages takes control of the user and he must read the narrative in a determinate time with enough attention to answer to a number of questions. The work combines text with multimedia elements once it is incorporated characteristics of interactive games. It is different from a game in the fact that the most important thing is the story and not the interactivity. It is a narrative in which everything is put in the right order and apart from the interactivity it can be read coherently.
A casual game in the platform style based on simple reading of texts.
