Mirror Your Audience

In many stores, especially fantasy, there is a token character who follows the plot around asking questions everyone in-world should already know the answers to, but since thee audience won't know it; and we can't expect them to pick up on intricate details or political positions before some characters are introduced (it also is used often to add foreboding to a nemesis or antagonist, they'd seem a bit underwhelming if they only appeared at the end with no explanation as to that they were an evil villain who controls small island nations).

In The Lord of the Rings this duty was filled by the Hobbits, small folk who didn't adventure or get much news from beyond their borders, they needed to have all the customs and history explained to them, you may have noticed that the hobbits were all split up and got sent to all the different major countries Rohan, Gondor and Mordor, this while helping the plot, allowed Tolkin to give as much back-story to those countries as he wanted, because the Hobbits were inquisitive and knew very little.

A more recent and somewhat glaring version of this is in Guild Wars 2 (yes again, more Guild Wars, it's just really good an example OK), where one of the playable races is this trope. The developers of Guild Wars 2, Arenanet, set their second game 250 years after the events of the first four campaigns (six campaigns if you count the Beyond content for Prophecies and Factions), and that's a lot of lore and story details that new players are going to be missing, some of which is need to know stuff, so how do they explain all this story and lore to the player without it seeming like a history lesson? Easy: have a group of people who ask questions and are generally inquisitive. Enter the Sylvari. A race of plant people who are born fully grown out of a tree and upon awakening have only a general feeling that there is trouble in the world and they kinda need to help fix it. Inquisitive and child-like, the Sylvari are the perfect tool for explaining to the player any need to know lore or history.

But that's not the only way of telling story and lore surreptitiously to an audience, again in Guild Wars 2, we have the Norn, a race of essentially: Super Vikings, who's favourite past time as a whole is telling stories of their great battles and challenges. What better way to tell the player about a rather difficult foe than have a ten foot wall of muscle tell them how he battled with the creature for hours, fighting tooth and claw, and eventually ended the fight in a draw. You might have second thoughts about wandering the wilderness with such a fierce beastie on the prowl. To add extra atmosphere you could add some warning signs about the foe or some tracks, claw marks on trees, it's all about reinforcing an idea.

Guild Wars 2 comes out in a few days now, let's see if it stands up to the level of story telling I expect of it.

We'll meet again

As a rule, I don't like finishing books. After such a long adventure together with the characters, they're like old friends to me. Old friends I must now part with, their story is over and their world closes one final time. The first book I cried reading was Winnie the Pooh because it addressed this very issue in it's final chapter.

Some things help though. Fanfiction for one, be it prequels where it focuses on a single character or a sequal that goes over the normally skipped political upheaval that would come from many adventure book's endings (defeating a god or saving a world, many people's lives would be forever changed). I'm allowed to (as long as it's well written) revisit and once more be with my old friends: the protagonists.

Another thing that helps is books that are tie-in media, like the Guild Wars 2 tie-in books, Ghosts of Ascalon and Edge of Destiny (about which I'm still not sure, after reading both, which one is ment to be read first). Because after going through the effort of creating a lead up stort and a world for it to perpetually exist in I am firm in the knowledge that I can once again see my old friends from a distance as they live their lives and make new stories.

Easy(ish) steps to enjoying a story

I enjoy a good story as much as the next person, but sometimes...I want to enjoy it more than the next person...and the guy before me too, I want to enjoy it the most! And here's how I do it:

1: Never read the blurb
You might think that helps judge the book/movie (it won't work for games they have different rules) but more often than not it will just contain major spoilers for the first 2 acts of the story.
2:Judge the book by it's cover
You may think the title is important...but not as important as the fancy pictures on the fount of the book, and in thee instance you get a bad book you still have on you like the look of and can frame it in case of emergency.
3.Don't tale any recommendations
Peoplle want to give you terrible biases, and tell you which books you should read/movies you should watch. but they are terrible lairs and want you to read fifty shades of gray or twilight or something equally awfully.
4.Nothing written within the last 10 years
Books and movies are like some wines and need to age before they are any good for consumption, so put you books and movies into a dark cupboard to keep them from picking up obscure pop-culture references.. Know how all those great books from the 1960's were all the rage at the turn of the millennium, that is this principal in action.
5.Try to keep books/movies grouped by genera
If you don't then they'll bleed into one another and you'll end up with really odd films/books.

So if you follow these simple 6 rules then you too will....hmm? I missed a steep?

6.When in doubt watch/read a caper
 Because capers are awesome

Love a story that follows the rules

When I read a story or watch a movie or show, there are time when you can just tell how a scene is going to tun out. The bad guy set the meeting point? Ambush. Hero was knocked off screen and villain thinks him dead? He's just about to make a come back. And some times this ruins a scene for me. When there's no mystery it just becomes formulaic.

Except in one circumstance.

Which is when in the middle of a fight or some kind of trial....a remixed/extended version of the theme song starts playing. Because you know that things can only get awesome from here. It could be the change from normally quite a noisy scene to one that only has (normally operatic) music and characters talking that causes my heart to stir so easily. But I can't get enough of it.

Examples?
Last episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann when the rift to Earth opens
Kung Fu Panda when the light jangly music starts plays during Po and Kufu's fight
Doctor Who whenever "All the Strange Strange Creatures" starts playing

Post Credit Games

So you've saved the world and rescued the princess and everything is all done and dusted, credits roll and the title screen reappears. To some people that's the last they ever see of the game, beat it once it's beaten for good.

For people like me however, that's far from then end of it. Quite a lot of games now days offer some kind of new game +, a game mode where you play the game again with bonus features or extra restrictions (like keeping your level/stats/weapons/abilities and having a bunch of challenges added or scaled up to your assumed mastery of the game. Early examples of this were the second quest in the original Legend of Zelda (NES) and playing as Luigi in Super Mario. But sometimes that's not enough, and that's where player enforces rulesets and challenges come in.

Some common challenges include speed clears (beating the game as fast as possible), low percent runs (beating the game while completing as little as possible or being at the lowest possible level) and glitched (beating the game by breaking in game rules or abusing the game's engine to skip large portions of the game or cause any number of strange happenings). We'll use The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time as an example because it has been extensively abused and lots of skips and glitches have been found that can shorten the game down to as low as 28 minutes. If you were to do a speed run of OoT it normally includes completing all dungeons as fast as you can, to do so, you have to avoid all the side quests...or: you can utilize a glitch known as Bottle Quest where you abuse the in game memory and change bottled bugs/fish into extra bottles and plot related items which let you skip right to the end game dungeon (normally with only 3 hearts of life) which is a challenge in of itself when the final boss fight starts. A low percent run come in two types, low health and low items. Low health requires you to pick up no extra health and low items requires you to try and solve as many of the puzzles in the game without the recommended items (which is surprisingly possible).

All in all I've beaten Ocarina of Time around seven times myself, and only spending $20 on the game as a pre-owned title a decade ago and have got quite a lot of value out of it.

This was relevant because while trying to pass away time I started a no-NPC-Ally playthrough of Guild Wars Factions (never add NPC henchmen to our party) with a friend, we've both played the game for a while and thought a bit of a challenge was in order, so we'll see how that goes.

What's in my name

I've always tried coming up wit names that have a semblance of meaning, A character who dedicates themselves to defending others? Bastion. A character who wants nothing more than adventure? Name them after a character from myth: Wayland. And if all else fails just go with something that can be used as part of a slightly obvious pun, as is what I plan to do when Guild Wars 2 comes out in a few weeks and my first character (If no one's beaten me to that name) would be What Army (or a homophone for it). Because nothing would be better to me than playing with some friends and the line "You going to stop me? You and what army?" come up. Better than Christmas, Halloween and Easter all at once is a successful pun. As good as naming the player character Go Away in pokemon games or naming everyone Bob in an RPG and watching as everything becomes very confusing (probably best done on repeat playthroughs because sometimes the plot is good)