KG

What about the original fairytales and folklore which were altered with each telling based on the audience and how they reacted? How about audience participation when improvising? How about chain writing where a fan would write the next chapter?

I’m not saying any of it is any good but it still happens, happened and has will have going to happen.

Give the player the freedom he wants and need, let him develop his actions and character the ways he want and let him determine what type of character want to be inside your story, but your story, characters and universe must be fixed in stone, if not, just forget about the story and create some type of emergent universe where the content is generated by players and IA actions, S.T.A.L.K.E.R is a little but important step in that direction-.

However, I think that which is unique among the games with the greatest stories (Deus Ex, Planescape Torment, TLJ, KotOR, and so on) is their stone-set nature. What each does so very brilliantly is tweak how you *experience* that story, which is why I firmly believe games are a valid medium for linear story. The key is to disguise that linearity. Deus Ex is perhaps the greatest example of this, where people live or die depending upon your decisions, but essentially, you’re being told the same story. You go to Hong Kong to rescue your brother, or recover your brother’s corpse – but you go to Hong Kong.

Something like KotOR, where your behaviour dicates how the world responds to you, and your decisions toward the end decide how it will climax, are again clever, distracting decorations around a set story you’ll be told either way.

This is really exciting – your behaviour changes how the story will be told to you, but not necessarily the story itself.

What I’ve found works best is having a ludic layer that can stand on its own, with a fiction that weaves in and out of it to provide interesting context, explanation and flavor. You can play Shock2 or BioShock and completely ignore the logs and radios, and on the flip side you can think of the action in the game as just filler between juicy story bits. Different players want different things out of the experience and if it’s multilayered you can satisfy a larger part of the spectrum.

KG

If you want to tell a orthodox story, your story, don’t make a game, where the main point is interactivity and the decision power of the player. And i played my fair share of excellent games with great story.

But i also played games like Dreamfall which would be really better in another medium, like a novel.

Have you played a pen & pager RPG? I will suppose you have played. One of the old and true hints for GMs is to not try to tell your pet story, a good story in a RPG is instead created with the correct collaboration and interaction between the GM and the players. And i think it’s a valid point also for game designers.

What I’m wondering is how much value this really adds to the non-game bits. If I had to watch Citizen Kane via a projector that operated by a hand crank, I think the work would suffer if anything. Yes, I’m technically responsible for “turning the pages”. The problem is that designers who take this tack are frequently not very honest with themselves about how much they really care about what’s unique to the medium they’re working in, ie whether they might be better off just making a movie, writing a novel, drawing a comic, etc.

There are plenty of reasons adventure games are no longer dominant, and one of them is certainly that in all but the very best ones, the player gets to play the most pedestrian, least involving role possible in the unfolding of the (only sometimes) awesomely amazingly epic storyline.