First and most obviously, games with narrative choice systems are incredibly time-consuming and I've been a very busy grad student, tending to spread myself thin and overextend my resources volunteering for other projects. I've been focusing a lot on filling out my technical background, which means I've been in workaholic mode for the last quarter.
Second, I've had to refine my thesis and its goals a lot. There's been a good few times I've re-considered narrative choice in general due to my interests as a game designer being on a little bit of a different path, scope issues with the material of the thesis and my presentation to the thesis board (which I expected to fail up until the very last week, when I figured out exactly how to wrap it all up), and, in particular, due to scope issues trying to discern a good visual component. That said, I didn't want to jump the gun and spend hours evaluating these games if my thesis should change dramatically.
Third, as I've stated previously there is and has been a need to clean up my rubric a little bit and make the qualifications for good/bad discernability and personalization a little bit more concrete and streamline the process. Ideally I'd like to judge it on five or more sub-points so as to create a clear -5 to 5 or a -10 to 10 scale. From my previous case studies I should be able to do so easily.
That said, I've gathered together a to-do list of games that I still need to perform full evaluations of.
- L.A. Noire
- Dragon Age: Origins (referenced in thesis, playthrough not complete)
- Alpha Protocol
- The Witcher 2
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Overlord (Playing it anyway, might as well analyze it)
- StarCraft 2 (Played, not evaluated)
- Fable 3 (Playthrough not complete)
- Deus Ex
- Iji
