What I've Been Up To

I've been thinking a lot about narrative structure lately. How to tell a story has become very interesting to me and as such I've been taking a look at a variety of mediums and what people have done with narrative structure with them. Here's a quick list of some of the titles that I've been looking at and what I find interesting about their narrative structure:

Video Games:

Grand Theft Auto IV - Gives players a lot of personal freedom while simultaneously forcing them down a specific narrative path.

Dragon Quest VIII: Gives little to no freedoms, and story is very structured and quite unsurprising, but feels more like a full world than most RPG's I've played.

Fallout 2: Has a specific narrative, but the player is only required to see the bare bones of it, most of the game is optional and mini-endings are given for every city you visit.

Webcomics:

The Dreamland Chronicles: Simple story with no surprises (yet), but I'm still enchanted by the story. The visuals combine with the fairy tale-esque story to capture my inner child.

The Last Days of FOXHOUND: Starts with extremely crude drawings and similar humor, and doesn't upgrade too much over the course of the series. Despite this it manages to not only remain comically consistent, but is also one of the best synopsis of the Metal Gear series up to MGS4, without showing Solid Snake once. The result is a second look at the enemies that I was able to put down so easily in-game, and now I wish I had been on their side.

Movies:

Iron Man: Simple premise, excellent cast and a lot of good, wry humor. The result is a story that is fun and never makes you feel bad (unlike The Last Days of FOXHOUND, which almost had me in tears).

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Simple premise, excellent cast (seem familiar), and a perfect treading the line with what could have been a terrible story. Proves that dangerous gambles pay off big (it even made me forgive the monkey scene).

This is just a small selection of what I've been thinking about, but I have noticed one thing in common with all of these, and that is that there is a story being told, one story, and while some may have multiple endings, they are still fairly limited in their scope. I'm curious if it would be possible to create something that has multiple plot threads that run together, but not into a single story, and give each of these threads multiple endings. I think I'm just tired of how multiple endings work in video games at the moment. Multiple endings are usually determined by one painfully-obvious choice, and the choice leads to a "bad" ending and a "good" ending. I wonder what it would take in order to make endings that felt more dynamic, more influenced by your actions over the course of the entire game, and what it would be like to see a game that has multiple "good" endings, letting the player decide what they feel is the best ending.

Maybe I'm just bored. The point is, if you like the Metal Gear and/or Metal Gear Solid series, you should really go read The Last Days of FOXHOUND, it'll give you a whole new experience.

P.S. Everything I mentioned here is good and I recommend seeing/playing/reading it aside from Dragon Quest VIII, which is mediocre at best (has good music and visuals, but a predictable plot and the game is a grind, 59 hours and level 30 of 99, that's just absurd).

Edit: Apparently it's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, woops.