Learning Outcome 1: Appraise the issues relevant to visual storytelling in various contexts.

Games are interactive forms of storytelling in contrast with a movie in which you will not have an effect on the story telling. Whilst a game the designer has to decide if the player will have some kind of impact on the story or if they are just playing through the game to get a predetermined outcome no matter their choices.

For games in particular here are some examples of the issues that are prevalent:

• Audience – young, old, sex, race - in this case I am referring to cultural sensitivity, core gamer/casual gamer etc
• The type of game, for example an RTS (Real Time Strategy ex. Age of Empires) has different requirements for storytelling to a TBS (Turn Based Strategy ex XCOM).
• The type of control – ex the Wii controller is very different to a mouse and keyboard.
• Payment model, for example if a game is free to play is the story going to be told in a episodic way where the player has to pay to find out what happens next in their story.
• The hardware the game is on. A PC has much more freedom for storytelling methods in games compared to a 3DS for instance. An example would be cinematic, you could have the whole game told through cinematic in a PC game but there simply isnt enough space to do this on a hand held game system.
• Mobile or Stationary? It is much more necessary to have short to the point storytelling for a mobile app game compared to a long drawn out storytelling method of a PC role playing game for instance.