Vassiliki and Navid Khonsari: Making mediums the message
iNK Stories founders Vassiliki and Navid Khonsari blend documentary storytelling with interactive design to create immersive experiences that illuminate real-world narratives.
storytelling
A new videogame about piecing together drunken memories
Is it a coincidence that autobiographical games are the ones that seem to experiment with new storytelling ideas the most? Look at the infinite scrolling world of life and death in Passage (2007), the collage of frustrations in Dys4ia (2012), the awkward online conversations of Cibele (2015), and th
Toryansé and the storytelling advantages of short games
Nick Preston decided to call his upcoming series of short adventure games Toryansé after the Japanese folk song of the same name. The song is traditionally sung as part of a children’s game—Warabe uta, which is very similar to the English nursery rhyme game Oranges and Lemons—but has surprisingly da
A videogame with a little girl you can actually care about
Videogames have a history of being terrible at depicting young girls. The problem is usually that the designers want you to care about them, to want to safeguard them, but try to engineer that in the most obnoxious way. Either they’re being used as zombie bait like Sherry in Resident Evil 2 (1998),
The irresistible appeal of roguelike storytelling
A 20-something girl stands in an elevator. There’s an eye patch on her face, a shotgun on her back, and a pistol in her right hand. The door opens, and she hits the ground running into a room full of drones. They hover over her, firing red lasers completely bent on killing her. After all, why wouldn
New videogame thriller takes its cues from The Twilight Zone
“You had a good life. But things changed,” explains the narrator of Asemblance as you begin your descent into a world of reconstructed memories. The machine asks how much of your past life you remember, then: “Are you sure you want to remember?” Last year, Niles Sankey founded Nilo Studios out of a
Videogames and the art of spatial storytelling
French philosopher Guy Debord talked about the idea of the dérive, a mode of travel where the journey itself is more important than the destination, where travelers “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” But to think of dérive as a kind of ran
Life’s problems are given a beautiful mystique in WEAVE
Problems are no longer immaterial in Nadav Tenenbaum’s “abstract journey” WEAVE. They rise up silently from the seas as huge spheres of ebony, blocking out the sun. Or they take up all your living space as unconquerable Sisyphean boulders. Problems cannot be ignored and they will find you. This is w
Homesick is a story exploration game about people, nature, and night terrors
Homesick isn’t afraid to court environmentalist politics.
The stormy world of Three Fourths Home has drama, cornfields
An interactive story about family and feeling lost.
Simogo has released the first episode of their mystery podcast
More episodes to become available over the next three weeks.
In Children of Morta, the family that fights evil together stays together
Narrative comes to the roguelike in Children of Morta.
One of the most elaborate alternate reality games ever is launching early next year
Augmented reality just got a lot more intense.
The Red Wedding looms large in Telltale’s Game of Thrones
Valar morghulis, indeed.
A look at the creative process, from the maker of Night in the Woods
Or: “the courage to share something incomplete.”
The interactive storybook that makes every kid a hero
Little girls deserve to dream of more than being a princess.
Daniel Benmergui on the troubles of telling all the world’s stories
The troubles and trials of telling every story ever.
The insidious influence of blockbuster cinema on videogames
Going big, going home.
Computer programmed to write fables reveals storytelling is, like, really hard
Or, “Notes From a Bitter Human Writer.”
In the sci-fi mystery game Cloud Chamber, your co-op partner is the entire internet
Found footage style storytelling like Blair Witch Project compels horror movie audiences for obvious reasons. Unlike regular film experiences, found footage supposedly has no author. With no one telling the story, the audience almost begins to feel as though they themselves are the ones responsible