If a book is like an armadillo, then can games be robot armadillos?
Telegraph reported on a talk given by The Sense of Ending author Julian Barnes, where he equated the structure of a novel to America’s favorite desert armored mammal:
He compared a novel to an armadillo an animal with an exoskeleton and an internal one. The exoskeleton, he explained, was the overall structure. In this case, he knew he wanted a short set-up and a long pay-off about 30 pages to 90. But he found that as he wrote, the head got longer and the tail shorter the ratio ended up being 50 pages to 100.
I’m working through 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and even though the game has a ridiculous plot centered around a stolen skull and Tony Yayo having to help 50 Cent climb over walls, it seems that the game’s plot is also vaguely armadillo-y. Just goes to show that even though the guts of the beast might be a bit different, the form of storytelling remains the same.
-Drew Millard
