Greetings!
Welcome to Playing With Premise, a blog dedicated to the close examination of the narrative elements in video games. The last ten years have seen an incredible increase in both the complexity of game stories and the degree to which they effect the gameplay, much of which has been lost on me. This blog will feature both my attempt to get up-to-date with the state of story in modern gaming and my explorations of how the story, character, and setting of a game interact with the action.
Each examination will cover five to six blog entries, depending on whether or not the title has any distinct expansion content. Every series will begin with an overview of the title’s history, reception, and bit about my experiences playing the title. From there, the focus shifts to a piece-by-piece look at the prominent narrative elements of a game: Its setting, characters, and plot. The fifth, and potentially final, entry will look at how these elements intermingle with the gameplay. Should the game have an expansion pack, its contents will receive a compressed version of the examination process tailored to fit into a single entry. These examinations will take long enough without doubling (or trippling) the duration.
While the scope of this project encompasses all manner of games, I’ll be paying special focus to Role-Playing Games. In addition to being my favorite genre, RPGs have a close tie to story, setting, and character which makes them ideal for the style of examination I’m aiming for. A weak narrative can sink even the strongest RPG gameplay, and conversely a strong story can salvage an otherwise mediocre title. Close looks at first-person shooters and strategy games are planned, but they won’t be quite as common.
It’ll be a couple weeks before things settle into a routine. The next week will be laying down a working definition of the Computer Role-Playing Game and the criteria I’ll be examining games on. After that I’m going to take a look at the games that contributed to my original conception of the cRPG, namely The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, which’ll take a while to get through. Once that’s done, it’ll be on to more recent fare. That said, odds are I won’t be reviewing anything really new for a while.
Playing With Premise 
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