Borders Blog

ZOCs and narrative together?

I've been trying out a computer game called Battle for Wesnoth. In some ways, it's like a 1970s wargame: hex maps with Zones of Control. In other ways, it's like a Role-Playing Game: units represent individuals and can level up. Then again, like most recent computer games it has good graphics, great sound effects and a nice User Interface. Even better, it's a highly ‘moddable’ — it comes with a campaign editor so you can modify the campaigns that come with it, and you can download user-created campaigns. The most radical aspect of all is that it supports strong narratives (and in zillions of languages yet), thereby unifying all three strands of game design!

Oh, and one more thing: it's free.

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Update (30-May-2007): woops, only two strands: it's Gamist and Narrativist, but makes no attempt to be realistic, so it's not Simulationist. (See the Wikipedia article on GSN theory for a good explanation of these terms.) But it's still a great piece of Free Open-Source Software.

Posted by: Chris Chittleborough at 02:56 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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