http://www.1up.com/features/would-you-kindly
This is an article written by Nickolai Adkins in regards to the Unreliable Narrator in video games and movies. He uses Bioshock as a chief example in how the designer can make the player progress forward in a seemingly natural way, that can end with an interesting plot twist.
The whole "Unreliable Narrator" mechanic is how often times in games the player is forced to do something they normally wouldn't do due to a forced story element. What Adkins brings to light is how you can do this without making the player feel like their forced purely for gameplay. There is a way to make the player progress and make it feel like the protagonist had to do it because it made sense in the story, not because it's required to keep the game moving.
Go ahead and have a read and share your thoughts below!
Unreliable Narrators
● ARCHIVED · READ-ONLY
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Interesting article. I've never thought too much about this before. Good timing too. I just watched a film the other day (Silent House - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_House_(film) that goes this route.
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Bioshock is a bastardized Sustem Shock 2. Long before Andrew Ryan, we had SHODAN.
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True, but it still serves as a good example nonetheless, and more people nowadays have played BioShock than System Shock 2. The purpose of this is communicating the idea. XD
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Great article. Misleading the player is unavoidable if you're planning any type of plot twist, which is pretty much expected because straight forward stories are considered very boring by today's standards. The one thing I do take issue with is amnesia as the source of unreliable narration, i.e. the main character thinking things are different than they actually are because they just don't remember what happened in the past. There are so many other avenues of approach to take when developing the plot.
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Read some of Agatha Christie's novels (and short stories for that matter) - you'll gain a great perspective on how to give what appears to be a complete telling of a story while leaving key elements to be discovered later.