rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead
Latest
Unleash your imagination in an organized way with Nevigo's game-narrative tool
Crafting a complex, logical and engaging story is difficult enough on a linear level, but building an entire world of diverging options, storylines, conversations and endings in a video game is an especially trying process. As artists ourselves, we sympathize with the plight of video-game writers and encourage them to find a process that works with their individual creativity, such as articy:draft, the "first" professional narrative-design program from Nevigo. The above video demonstrates how articy:draft's use of "flow fragments" and a visual writing template can help eliminate plot holes, logical flaws and dead ends in convoluted stories. "Game writers can now craft non-linear plots easily," Nevigo CEO Kai Rosenkranz (Heads!) said. "The era of post-its on walls is finally over." Whoa -- we were with you until the sticky note thing, buddy. We happen to like our walls covered in incomprehensible post-it notes; it adds a sense of psychotic drama to the office and makes us look like we're doing important, semi-permanent things in vague, scribbled descriptions, such as, "take the left fork and the right spoon," "CAROLINE" and "Yes, but we need it in Hunter Green." Call us purists, but we'll keep our sticky notes, thanks. Now if only we could find the minutes from that meeting on the importance of organization, we'll be set.
All the World's a Stage: Center of the universe
All the World's a Stage returns today after a week off due to reasons beyond the comprehension of mortal man. Mysteries abound in World of Warcraft, and roleplayers are there to enjoy them.In roleplaying, one's own character is never the center of the story -- this is true. But from another perspective, your character is always the center of the story -- and this is also true. It seems like a paradox, but it's actually a way of understanding your own relationship to the world.In most stories, the main characters are usually the ones who have the most impact on the world around them: they are the heroes who save the day, fall in love, and make the choices that determine the ultimate outcome of the plot. In a way, the whole story circles around them, like planets around the sun. The structure of Warcraft lore is built with the stories of characters like this, whose choices made the World of Warcraft what it is today: Arthas, Thrall, Jaina Proudmoore and the like.But the roleplaying community of imaginative characters is not such a centralized system. When immature roleplayers fail to understand this, they end up with a chaotic mess where everyone wants to steal the spotlight. But mature roleplaying environments are quite the opposite: they are cooperative rather than competitive, and quite unlike traditional storytelling patterns. Where traditional stories are like a solar system, with main characters around which all the other characters revolve, roleplaying in WoW it is like the expanding universe itself: a web of interconnected stories and characters in which the center appears to be nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
