Hello -- this is my first posting here, although I should have bothered to find this place a long time ago! For years I''ve been wondering if a great story could be told in a game. Storytelling is widely recognized as an important element of the game-playing experience -- but is it possible for the story to rise above this hand maiden status? This road for me started when I began playing Thief: The Dark Project. A friend used to work for Looking Glass Studios, and he highly recommended the game. A couple of years later, I''ve already created two of my own Thief "missions" and I''m working on a third. But before I went too far, I really wanted to combine an understanding of my two great vocational passions -- design and writing (which is what creating games seems to be all about -- with a large dab of computer science tossed in). And when this sort of thing hits me I tend to write about it as clearly as I can. My notes have been online for nearly two years, and recently a screenwriting school started using them as part of their curricula. Cool, but that was not my intended audience. I really wanted to help out those struggling to apply storytelling theory to games (myself included). And so that is why I''m here. I am not an expert -- I don''t think anyone is yet on this topic. But I''d like to offer you what I''ve written so far, and by all means accept whatever comments and critiques you may have to offer in return. Together, we can figure this out. Here are the URLS... http://edanet.com/thief/story1.html http://edanet.com/thief/story2.html http://edanet.com/thief/story3.html http://edanet.com/thief/story4.html http://edanet.com/thief/story5.html http://edanet.com/thief/story6.html http://edanet.com/thief/story7.html

Waverider -- Here''s a place to start...

Aristotle, Poetics. S. H. Butcher, ed. (Dover, 1997)

Then try...

David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. (Vintage Books, 2000)

I''d also borrow a few screenwriting books from the library (any will do for now) -- not because you would ever try this -- but because it is one of the most compressed of the established storytelling forms. And that sort of brevity is good practice for any dramatic writing -- and the closet thing to writing for games.

quote: Original post by frobber
My notes have been online for nearly two years, and recently a screenwriting school started using them as part of their curricula. Cool, but that was not my intended audience. I really wanted to help out those struggling to apply storytelling theory to games (myself included).

No offense, but the reason your notes are being used by a film class is because (from what I read) they apply more to screenwritting than to game design. That isn''t to say what you''ve written doesn''t apply to games, especially ones with linear storylines, but a game is a lot more than just a good story. Like Superpig said, it''s perfectly acceptable to have a game without any story at all, and most games (outside of computer, video and roleplaying games) don''t really have stories or even a setting (purely abstract.) I think stories play an important role in games, but I think dynamic, interactive stories and worlds are a lot more important than writting a linear screenplay (why not just make a movie then?)

I agree than many very entertaining games do just fine without a big story (or any story, in some cases). It''s not my point that every game should tell a story. I''m just wondering if a great story could be told within an interactive gaming-like venue if we were to attempt this (without, of course, ruining the gaming experience, or better -- enhancing it).

Screenwriting is my jumping-off point, since it''s just about the closest standardized writing form to what I believe we would need to write a great story for a game -- just as how stage play writing was once the jumping-off point for screenwriting.

Lastly, I may actually be arguing for some sort of "new" art form that is not quite a linear story and not quite a game -- but some sort of blended amalgam of both. In fact I see this as inevitable given the overall trend of media and art form convergence.

Yeah, I have been thinking about how to implement a decent dynamic story system for a while, and I''ve concluded that, at this point at least, it''s more of a game design and technical challenge than it is a writting challenge. That isn''t to say writters aren''t important, but game writting (for dynamic\nonlinear stories) has to be done in a different way than screen writting. There was a thread on this a few days ago, pretty interesting stuff (even though I don''t think we came to any conclusions.)