Extra Credits

The Fantastic - How to Make Compelling Games Set in the Real World (6x8)

: 04, 2015

Games often turn to sci-fi or fantasy settings tod raw players in to an immediately interesting and exciting world. But what about the potential of games set in our modern, very real world? They allow us to explore situations that may come up in our own lives, but they run the risk of being either too mundane to engage our interest or too metaphorical for us to relate to them. Tsvetan Todorov's literary theory of the Fantastic provides one solution. By adding a twist of the supernatural to an otherwise very ordinary world, we can create suspense as both the player and their character struggle to figure out whether this supernatural event can be rationally explained (the fantastic uncanny) or whether it represents some previously unrecognized twist to their accepted reality (the fantastic marvelous).