Blogeridoo number 2 (Prince of Persia game blog)

Okilly dokilly, so this week I played Prince of Persia. It was pretty fun despite the weird camera movement and a couple of slightly clunky game mechanics. Most of the game is jumping around very linear levels to reach objectives whilst dispatching a few enemies along the way.

This game was very much a 'ludus' type of game. That is a game with a clear goal and simple rules for how to reach that goal and win. I think this game also falls under the definition of a 'top down', or 'narrative game' as explained by Marie-Laure Ryan in her paper 'From Narrative Games to Playable Stories.' In short, she says a 'top down' game is designed so that the narrative is already set in place by the game creator, as well as problems to be solved and mechanics to solve them. The player is not free to play as they choose, they must play by the rules. Similarly, a 'narrative game' gives you rules to play by and goals to reach, but the narrative takes a back seat and is only there to give some context to the 'play.'

In Prince of Persia I found myself not really caring about the story so much as I just wanted to jump around and fight and spin on a pole. I felt this was the real core of the game. There were cutscenes for days, but they mostly felt like they were in the way of my experience. They pulled me out of my interaction and made me sit through a short film instead of playing.
In this way I don't think the cutscenes added much to the game. While they helped me understand why I was doing things, I didn't really care why. I just wanted to do stuff uninterrupted.

Since the story was of so little interest to me, I found I didn't care that I had little to no effect on what happened in the story. There was no branching or decisions that had to be made, instead the story was entirely linear, and I think it worked for the game. Since it was so linear in both story and level design, I always knew what to do and where to go which meant I could just focus on getting there and having fun doing it. In a game that focuses on the story and not the gameplay it is much more important to make the player feel part of the story, but here I think it would have been better to have a little less story and a little more play.

To summarise, I enjoyed playing the game, but I didn't care about the story. The linear narrative was a good decision to keep it simple so play could be the focus, but the extensive cutscenes felt unneeded and at times very frustrating. Also spinning on poles is fun in games, I'm keen for more pole mechanics.