Interactive Narrative - Week 3

Prince of Persia – Sands of Time

Do the story nodes in your chosen game(s) work well to support gameplay and gameplay objectives? Why or Why not.
Nodes: A games cues a player into imagining a fictional world and participating in a story. (First person storytelling.)
Games can do this in a number of ways:

• Graphics
• Sound
• Text
• Cut scenes
• The game title, Box, Manual
• Rules

In the game Prince of Persia – Sands of Time it was easy to tell what game nodes I felt worked and others that were going to annoy me very quickly.

The graphics of Prince of Persia – Sands of Time seems pretty good for the time it was released
(2003) and worked fine to support the gameplay and the cut scenes in the game, It was later pointed out to me that the graphics in the cut scenes are of a higher quality than the gameplay but this did not bother me because It did not take anything away from the gameplay itself.

Sound was another aspect that supported both the gameplay and the cut scenes well, because at the start of the game you are dropped in the middle of a war and the sounds that you are surrounded with only help show that, the only this that I felt could be changed was that the sound volume was a little inconsistent between the cut scenes and the gameplay but this a more personal issue for me.
The was little to no text shown in Prince of Persia – Sands of Time, The only text that was present in the game was the help tips that showed you how to progress.

Cut Scenes, this is the node that annoyed me the most about Prince of Persia – Sands of Time, while in the beginning they were informative and helped to progress the gameplay along with the added bonus that MOST were skippable after you had watched them the first time, there were just a few that were completely unneeded and did nothing to support or enhance the gameplay. The major one for me was the little cut scenes I got after every time I finished a battle, it was of the Prince putting away his sword . . . and that was it, the first time is was ok because I had just won my first fight in the game and was feeling pretty good and that little cut scene just made me feel pretty badass but after it began to happed after I finished each battle even ones I had to re do because I had died it just began to be a pain cause I just wanted to complete my next mission not watch some dude put his sword away for the twentieth time.

In the end I felt there where aspect and nodes that Prince of Persia – Sands of Time did pretty well with and other parts that did not work well to support the gameplay.
 I don’t think I would go back and play Prince of Persia – Sands of Time again because the nodes that did not work made me not enjoy the experience of playing, Prince of Persia – Sands of Time is a very Ludus narrative game meaning
 “In a narrative game, the player plays to win, to beat the game, and story is mostly a lure into the game world.”  I did not feel the urge to win the game and I don’t think the story itself was strong enough to hold me attention.