Building the Wonder, One Interaction at a Time

"Theories Behind Journey" - Jenova Chen, creator of Journey

- Build games around desired emotional experience and allow game play to arise from that.
- Visceral/social feedback as an incentive for action within a game. Tailor game play to deincentivize anything that will detract from the emotional experience that your are seeking to recreate.
- Three act system: build up, backward turn/twist, huge rise in emotional intensity
- Hero's journey is about transformation (stories are about combinations of small transformations, both for the characters and the reader)
- Emotional arc - craft setting based on experience that you want to create.
- "People hated the game" - huge iterations based on playtesting
- "By the end, when we shipped Journey, we actually went bankrupt." - Be ready to sacrifice.

Chen and his colleagues used an emotional arc to conceptualize and plot out
 Journey on both a metaphorical and a physical sense. The story, aesthetic, and
landscape were all crafted to convey specific emotional interactions and states.

I think the most interesting notion Chen put forward was that game mechanics don't necessarily have to take precedence over theme or story. So often, we look at games from a single perspective, insisting that core mechanics must come first and theme should arise from game play. Chen, in contrast, suggests that game play ought to arise from the core emotional experience and should be tailored specifically to reinforce that idea or feeling. It was neat to see that even in terms of physical landscape, Chen had used the emotional arc as the foundation for the entire game. This notion is, I think, going to be very important for me, especially in light of my current aspirations with regard to narrative. In any case, this will be really helpful in terms of my writing and game design.