Researching Domains and Topics

Okay, so after Robin's lecture about domains I went away and had a think about the key areas that I'm interested in and narrowed them down to three, Games, Storytelling and 3D Art and Design.

Then I made a mind map of stuff I think is related to environmental narrative, to give myself an idea of what I could look further into.

 I started researching Narrative theory and applying that to environmental/visual storytelling. Spent some time looking into the process involved behind the design/construction of virtual environments; what goes into the design of a scene or environment and what the meaning behind it is, and what message it is trying to convery through things like props, lighting, colour etc/ While doing this I tried to keep in mind how interactivity would be incorporated in a game world to drive the narrative without being too direct, making the player feel like they themselves are responsible for a particular story path, rather than just blindly following an obviously set out directive.

All Talk....

After identifying the domains, and researching some of the theory behind narrative techniques and environment design, I decided to have a look at some of the recent trends within domains and I found out that one of the recent trends in game design demonstrates that there is an increasing demand for games which incorporate elements of interactive story - so games like Heavy Rain.

Although, after reading an article by Barry Lowndes from Sheffield University, I discovered that one of the issues with environmental narrative is that while there has been considerable research into narrative techniques currently used in film and literature, these techniques do not nessesarily translate well over to the genre of video games. (Barry Lowndes - "Creating a Narrative Environment, Chioce and Consequence." Sheffield Hallum University) So it's clear I'll have to do some hunting around for more research on that, or do some tests of my own to determine the best way to convey a narrative through the environment of a game...