Filmed in 1969, Ken Loach, About a young man growing up.

Billy Casper
Feral kid, wears a hoodie
Broken home, failed by school and family.

Let’s play a game of Kes
• Storytelling in film
• - theatre
• - radio play
Simple story, allegorical. Filmed like a radio play, like a theatre production
Brutally cut and edited. The beginnings of natural storytelling in film?

All About Eve
On The Waterfront
A Matter of Life and Death

The Language of TV
Drama
• Episodes
• Seasons
• Story arcs
• Box sets

The Language of
Games?
Have Game stolen from TV & Film? No, but they have from the Web.
Game trailers are often poor, because they are passive not interactive

Episodic Games

Seasonal Games

Series & Serial Drama
• Standalone vs Ongoing story
• Series and Serial quests in MMOs
• What would it be like to play Friends, to
play The Wire?
Games have taken series and serial drama from TV

What it looks like to put myself in a game of The Wire

What it looks like to put myself in a game of Friends

Fictive Worlds
Not interactive fiction, not hypertext fiction. Single story
PvE. Sense that without action, player will fail

PvE
Episode 3, driven on by a phone-call
Sense of life in a story

Young Adult Fiction
• Fantasy
• Casuality
Adult issues and themes, in the broad middle-ground between fantasy and casuality

Not dependent on branching narratives:
- they don’t work, solution looking for a problem
- they’re not scalable, but they do work well for skill trees though

“Decisions have
Consequences”
Kids = binary, adults = grainy, young adults = exploratory (and hardest to write).

Prior Art?
Nothing I could find in games.
But there was in TV

The 1980s, I hated that decade
Now, I think it had the best drama and the worst music

Press Gang
1989 - 1993
“Written by Steven Moffat”
Why hasn’t this been rebooted?

Running Scared
1986
Adapted from a young adults novel
5pm drama dealing with adult themes
Very little left in terms footage

Where are they now?
No backups, no DVD copies available
Not on iPlayer, not for sale

Let’s play a game of ...
- Web-based, fictive worlds
- Simple, directed stories
- Interactive, allegorical
- Golden age of Gaming
We could have a “golden age of children’s gaming” over the next decade
Interactive for play, allegorical for depth.

Thanks :D
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberazzi/318947873/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh/3649492427/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/waltjabsco/2324212835/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrick_q/250798655/