Week 2 - Never Alone

The game that I liked the most was Never Alone and I decided to answer on of the questions which I felt was closer to the game.

How does your chose game tell its story? Is it successful?

Never alone has a really interesting introduction to it's story, the way the person tells the story made me want to start playing the game as soon as possible.
As I was playing the game I begun to understand how the creator of the game added basic elements to the story, such as friendship, and the connection of humans with nature and the spiritual, Today these things(apart from friendship) seem to be recognized as legends or myths, this game made me realize how modern society has forced us through materialism to forget the connection we once had with nature and the astral or spiritual world, things that are essential to a lot of us.

Salen and Zimmerman state that "players are constantly shifting between cognitive frames that alternately place them “inside” their character in a relationship of direct identification and very much outside of it, aware of the character as an artificial construct and fictional entity, as well as their own status as players manipulating a tool or “puppet” according to the rules of the game", Never Alone does this really well, because the game and the story have already established two characters and a strong spiritual connection between them, and I believe that this connections is what drive players to play or keep playing this game because you can identify yourself in a way that we all have connections with either our family, friends,partner, etc,  and it makes you think about it even more, because the game also deals with survival, life and death and what it means to loose something or someone you care about and at least for me, it intrigued me to keep playing it

One of the things that caught my attention is how the story tells/shows the connection between the fox and the girl, they have such a strong connection that whenever the girl or the fox died(in the game) it felt like whoever of those two characters stayed alive felt what the other one was feeling at the moment of dying, and I believe everyone can relate to this, everyone has some sort of connection with someone, either your family, best friend or partner, so the story has a great impact on the player when one of the characters dies because we can put ourselves in their positions.

After I achieved different obstacles in the game a short cinematic would be played and part of the story will be told, and every time I watched these short cinematic animations I wanted to keep playing to find out the rest of the story, what comes next? and that is something that I really enjoy in video games, when a story gives me that feeling of wanting more. I think Never Alone has successfully achieved telling a superb story to the player.

I still haven't finished playing the entire game, and I'm looking forward to complete it.