Reading 2: Planning my Approach!

Reading 2: Planning my Approach

Welcome back to my blog!

It’s exciting to get back into the swing of things, especially now that we’re planning on creating a book on game design together. I’m excited to work with you all again and to learn more about academic writing and further into the topic of game design!

For my writing topics I picked two from the storytelling chapter- “mechanisms for advancing the plot” and “scripted conversations and dialogue trees”. Many players tend to connect with games through their plot and characters so I’m excited to explore this further.

To help me conduct my research, I had to think of a research question. To do this, I thought of my topics and asked myself who, what, where and why to narrow down and focus on topics to research as part of my literature review. There are lots of questions that could be explored with these two topics; here are some I thought of:

1.       Is it necessary to have complex characters to aid a plot-line?

2.       How does character dialogue impact the plot of a game?

3.       How does character dialogue impact the player?

4.       Do players connect with well developed, complex characters more than simpler characters?

5.       Does something bad always have to happen to advance a plot?

6.       Do dialogue trees personalise and enhance the player experience?

7.       What are the effects of choice in scripted conversations?

8.       What are the most common ways to advance a plot-line?

9.       Does player choice matter in dialogue trees?

10.   How do unexpected twists affect a plot and its players?

Taking these questions into account, I refined them further. I combined some questions to give way for deeper analysis and research potential for both topics, and I think they would be interesting to explore!

For mechanisms for advancing the plot, I picked the question “What are the most common ways to advance a plot, and how does breaking the norm affect the player?”

For scripted conversations and dialogue trees, I picked the question “How does character dialogue impact the plot and does player choice in dialogue matter?”

Research illustration

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Readings in the past such as the hero’s journey plot structure stuck out to me when thinking of the first question, while my own experiences in games such as Telltale’s “The Walking Dead”, “Detroit: Become Human” and “Until Dawn” inspired me to explore the effect of player choice in dialogue and how it can impact the plot.

I have mentally ticked off the research question checklist for both of my questions and they all fell under “yes”, so I think I followed the steps in coming up with my questions well.

Some keywords that I can use to help me research are:

• Dialogue
• Dialogue tree
• Dialogue affect
• Dialogue impact
• Scripted conversation
• Character conversation
• Character interaction
• Butterfly effect
• Plot
• Game plot
• Plot mechanics
• Advancing plot
• The hero’s journey
• Common plots
• Plot twists
• Plot importance
• Plot impact

Tools I could use when conducting my research are the TU Dublin library, the library on our own campus, Google Scholar and other journals and reviewed articles available on the TU Dublin library site and on the internet.

I’m looking forward to getting a start on my research and exploring my chosen topics further!

Thank you for reading my blog!