Themes

Some of the books and journals I've been reading made reference to the current themes surrounding environmental narrative within the games industry, so I decided to explore some of these. They mainly revolved around the increasing demand for games with Emergent Narratives within Sandbox-style environments, so games like Grand Theft Auto 4, the Fallout series and Skyrim immediately sprang to mind;

 another theme was that of the increasing demand for games with more detailed storytelling elements and that of Branching Narratives, which I thought QuanticDream's Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit were the best example of.

While Emergent Narratives in sandbox style environments and Branching Narratives both offer plenty of opportunities, one of the main concerns expressed is that they are both prohibitively expensive and complex to incorporate.

Constraints

On the topic of concerns, many have been raised about the amount of constraints that must be applied to such a game to be able to keep control of a complex interactive narrative.

Ruth Aylett, one of the authors of "Computer Games, Text, Narrative and Play", said that there are "Fundamental conflicts of interest when creating games with a rich narrative; this is the contradiction between a pre-scripted sequence of events and the freedom of interactivity that is afforded to the player in a videogame."

So I guess it would be useful to look at these contradictions and juxtapositions between games with emergent narratives within a pre-scripted series of events that will undoubtedly unfold no matter what, and compare them with the games which utilize branching narratives to provide the player with the illusion that they are responsible for a particular path of gameplay unfolding, rather than traversing along a pre-destined and solid path. I'll do some research into Narratology and Ludology in the hopes that it will shed some light on the underlying principles behind narrative study and game studies, then hopefully find a way to amalgamate the two together...