Tag: liveblog

“Firewatch” Liveblog: Opening Sequence

So I believe that I just finished the opening sequence of the game. It basically gives us a backstory on Henry, the main character of the game. We see that his wife, Delilah, suffers from what appears to be early onset dementia. Having to care for a person with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or any debilitating disease is unfortunately something that many people around the world have to go through. Incorporating this into the plot can help players identify with the protagonist, something that will increase the amount of emotions toward the game.  With this information, we know more about his personal life and his intentions for taking a job as a fire watcher.

Taking into consideration that outcomes can be chosen by the player, it is safe to assume that there will be different outcomes depending on how you answer questions. This gameplay kind of relates to Gone Home, where one can’t actually change the ending of the game itself but can control how they get there, so player A’s experience is going to be a little different from player B’s. I am assuming that no matter what, the ending will be the same for everyone, but it would be interesting to see alternative endings.

Firewatch Intro & liveblog

This post is going to be my live-blog play-through of the game Firewatch. The beginning of Firewatch starts out with you, Henry, in a bar, and you meet a woman named Julia. I got stuck for about a minute because I didn’t realize that you had to click some of the dialogue. So I just kinda sat there staring at a screen wondering when it would change. I quickly went through the dialogues and Henry ends up marrying Julia. However, Julia develops dementia at age 41 and, she barely recognizes you when you visit her in her nursing home. Then, you take a job in a solitary “firewatch” tower in the woods where your only communication is over the radio with a woman named delilah. I believe that Henry is depressed and needs solitude, which is why he took this job in the woods. I’ll figure that out later.

“Firewatch” Liveblog

So I’m about to start to play Firewatch and liveblog my experience while playing said game. I’m kind of expecting a slow game but am excited to see if there are any interesting plot twists that will catch me off guard. I’ll be back to liveblog my thoughts after I finish the opening sequence. See you then.

 

 

Liveblogging Firewatch

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As you play through Firewatch for class on Tuesday, I want you to liveblog your experience playing. Liveblogging is an informal  sort of freewriting — while you are in the midst of playing the game, just notice whatever seems interesting to you and pause periodically to note those observations in your blog post.

The game begins with a fairly long opening sequence that sets up a little background for the main character and serves as a simple tutorial for basic game mechanics, so launch the game and play through that opening section, then pause the game and open your dashboard. Write a new blog post which starts by announcing that your’e beginning to play through the game and links back to this post (not just the course site, but this specific post). Tag your post with “Firewatch” and “liveblog” plus whatever other tags you’d like. (You can add tags in the post editor page, in the section labeled Tags, which should be in the sidebar just beneath categories and just above the featured image area.)

Write a paragraph (or a few sentences) responding to that opening sequence. Again, whatever is interesting to you about it — visual style, emotional reactions, comparison with the opening of Gone Home or Dear Esther, making predictions or noting expectations for where this game will head, whether and how this game operates as “art” in the way Bogost defines art games, whatever seems worth noting. Publish the post. Once you’ve published your post, you might check out the other students’ posts and see how they responded to the opening sequence — please leave comments on their liveblog posts responding to observations they made!

When your’e ready, go back to the game and play on. When you find a scene that seems particularly cool or beautiful or interesting, screenshot it. Be on the lookout for moments that seem worth commenting on. Check in periodically with your peers’ responses to the game and pay attention to whether you have similar or different reactions. Periodically leave comments on your own post updating your progress through the game and recording those observations. Leave comments on your peers’ posts too, responding to their observations.

Gone Home Observations

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As you play through Gone Home for class on Tuesday, please try to pay attention to your own thinking and emotional reaction as you play and take notes as you go. If we were a little later in the semester and you were more comfortable with publishing to your sites, I might have asked you to liveblog your game play — feel free to try that if you’re willing (see note below). Probably most of you will choose instead to play through the game, taking notes of the things you notice, and then when you’re finished write a blog post with 2-3 paragraphs worth of reflection on the experiences.

Pay careful attention to the start of the game. How does the game begin? How do you feel at the start? How does the game establish setting and time, both at the start of the game and then throughout? How does the game establish character? Especially think about how the game establishes character given that there is only one person present in the narrative and it’s the first person narrator — without dialog and other traditional methods of defining character, how do the game designers go about doing so? Finally, your first larger writing project will build from our discussion of Gone Home towards thinking about how games make use of objects and descriptions of those objects in order to shape narrative, so pay particular attention to all the various things that you pick up and examine and how the writing frames the meaning of those objects.

You do not need to address all of these questions. You do not even need to answer any of these questions, to be honest — if there is a different pattern that really captures your attention and you feel a burning desire to explore it in your blog post, then do that instead of answering the questions in the paragraph above.

Liveblogging

There are a number of different ways that you might liveblog game play. If you want to try it but aren’t sure how to pull it off, my suggestion is to open up your site in a tab and then launch the game. Just look around at the start point of the game for a minute or two, then write a blog post in which you announce your intention to liveblog your experience playing the game and then write a couple of sentences about the start point and publish the post. Then whenever you notice something interesting or worth commenting on as you play, leave a comment on your own post with your observation. Boom, liveblogging.

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