Chris Goodswen

We had a Lecture the other week of a ex Games Art and Design student Chris Goodswen who has just completed his masters degree in Games Design. We were asked to take down some notes for later research that would help us in this current topic. Most of what Chris Goodswen talked about was the jump from foundation degree and BA Honours to a Masters Degree and his progression from each year and the steps he had to take to get to where he is.

I made many notes that might help me later in my designs and time at University but he made a point during this lecture about Narrative theory particularly to non linear pipelines. I thought that this would be a good area of study that would relate to games and the Transmedia topic. After some research i found that Non-Linear pipelines are a way of telling a story/narrative by not placing information in chronological order in simpler words placing events in a different order to what they happened. The use of this is seen a lot in film and literature. The most common use is the telling of a memory as its piecing a part of the backstory during the middle of the main story.

When talking about Non-linear narrative in games normally reflects to how the story is being told, is it following a pipeline were the player cant escape the written narrative. Theres a debate over the use of Linear and non linear game play and when and when it shouldn't be used. Non linear games such as Fallout 3 often to get referred to as 'Sandbox' this means open world not a path in which to follow which allows narrative to be broken and played out how you feel like achieving it. When Creating Worlds in games there will be that choice to follow a linear pipeline of play or to go for the 'Sandbox' Non-linear play.

Relating this topic to Transmedia; A Linear game as more opportunity to work in Transmedia than a non linear due to the fact more mediums can display new information and useful information relating to narrative in a Linear game. This is because of a player in linear pipeline will have to follow the story meaning a lot of other world happenings in the game will not be told but might be going on, this can then be shared through the use of transmedia but non linear has the choice of allowing a player to explore and find out most of the worlds information in game meaning there would be less to place in transmedia. Relating back to Non linear pipelines in films and literature, a useful way of using Transmedia would be to use information in a non chronological order and place this in different mediums, this would be that the story would be stread around all different points creating an immersive story that happens in more than one area and piecing each part of the information together will create an immersive feeling and draw you into following and finding the information.