![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Mar. 1st, 2013 11:32 pmA cool thing I found while looking for something else:
The Matter of the Monster is a cute, very short, game that tells the story of three siblings who set out, one after the other, on a quest to slay a monster. At least, eventually that's the story it tells, but it doesn't do it all at once, or in order: the storyteller keeps going back and adding details in response to prompts from the story's audience. The player's role is to nudge the story at key points: are the siblings brothers or sisters? is this a traditional story in which the third sibling succeeds where others have failed, or a tale about co-operation where each of the siblings contributes something to the victory, or somewhere in between? And what kind of monster is it, anyway?
(There's also an evolving meta-story about who the storyteller and the audience are, and why the story is being told.)
The author is Andrew Plotkin, an experienced game designer who's written several longer games that are well-regarded and I'm told play around with storytelling conventions in interesting ways, but which I admit I've never got around to playing myself.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Everyone knows that it's helpless old women in the forest that turn out to be disguised fairies. Not madmen with ice cream on their hats."
The Matter of the Monster is a cute, very short, game that tells the story of three siblings who set out, one after the other, on a quest to slay a monster. At least, eventually that's the story it tells, but it doesn't do it all at once, or in order: the storyteller keeps going back and adding details in response to prompts from the story's audience. The player's role is to nudge the story at key points: are the siblings brothers or sisters? is this a traditional story in which the third sibling succeeds where others have failed, or a tale about co-operation where each of the siblings contributes something to the victory, or somewhere in between? And what kind of monster is it, anyway?
(There's also an evolving meta-story about who the storyteller and the audience are, and why the story is being told.)
The author is Andrew Plotkin, an experienced game designer who's written several longer games that are well-regarded and I'm told play around with storytelling conventions in interesting ways, but which I admit I've never got around to playing myself.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Everyone knows that it's helpless old women in the forest that turn out to be disguised fairies. Not madmen with ice cream on their hats."
