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Welcome to Exploratory Story

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Welcome to Exploratory Story. I am Ryan and I want to master the craft of storytelling. The main purpose of this blog is to record everything I learn about stories. I will explain more about the reason for this blog in a moment, but first there is an extremely important question to answer. What is a story? If I am dedicating an entire blog to stories, I must define what I believe makes a story. There are two main points I want to make: A story has a purpose.       If a story has no purpose, then it is a boring series of events. Primarily, a story’s purpose is to teach a lesson.      This is an idea that has been around forever, but really drilled itself into my brain reading and listening to Brian McDonald. He and Jesse Bryan had a great way to demonstrate the importance of purpose in storytelling. Think of The Tortoise and the Hare . What is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of The Tortoise and the Hare ?  Slow and steady wins the ...
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Celeste

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  Copywrite 2018 Matt Makes Games Moral: All your feelings are necessary.  Before writing this post, I thought it would be difficult to discuss Celeste, since games often have limited dialogue in between cutscenes. However, while preparing this post, I realized how clear Celeste's storytelling is and how deep this game goes into its characters. It is an extremely precise story. This is one of the best examples of how a game can tell a story, even in such a short timeframe. Not only is it well written, but the entire game is a metaphor.  Anxiety is like climbing a mountain, but a part of you is actively fighting against yourself. The game begins with the main character (who we will call Madeline) arriving at the mountain Celeste. We learn Madeline suffers from anxiety, or at least is struggling and wants to get away from everything.  Very early on we see a personification of her anxiety. A part of Madeline breaks free. “Badeline” begins trying to sabotage her quest to...
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Casablanca

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  © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. Moral : No one is neutral. For the first post in this blog, I want to start off with an undeniable classic. Casablanca . AFI’s #3 highest rated movie of all time. Quite frankly, this movie doesn’t need any introduction, so let's get started. Casablanca’s story structure is great to learn from, particularly act one. Act one immediately sets the scene. Two soldiers are said to be murdered for documents, a man is shot for having expired papers, and a friendly stranger turns out to be a pickpocket. Then we see Rick’s tavern. Even before meeting Rick, we see everyone inside scrambling and scheming to find a way out of Casablanca. Casablanca is dangerous. This is also a sort of metaphor. Just like all the refugees stuck in Casablanca, Rick is also stuck. He is stuck in the past. Next we meet Rick, and our plot begins. Rick is given Letters of Transit. Those Get out of Casablanca free cards are key factors. This is Chekov’s gun. R...
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