>>I started writing the dialogue choices for the dating sim/ren''ai game yesterday, and I really don''t think interactivity and solid, satisfying plot are mutually exclusive, but trying for both does make the writing a lot more difficult.

sunandshadow I think you''ve forgotten a couple of things.

If you make a game where the player decides the how the plot evolves, and all you give them are the possibilities they can work with, a starting point and the characters they can interact with... where does the actual plot originate? Is it in the writer''s ideas or in the player''s actions? I would lean more towards the later... because they are the ones deciding how it flows.

If you make a game that encourages players to choose you are no longer really making a "storyline"... your making a "sim" with a "setting". Your story becomes a setting rather than a narrative...

So you gotta ask is this game more of a simulator or a story?

^_^ Well I know you can say that these ren-ai games have a story (even though I haven''t played one)... but the focus is no longer on the original intentions of the storywriter but on the player''s decisions (even if their choices don''t change much at all).

Getting a bit off track here though... remember we are talking about whether or not a game can tell a story as well as a moive/novel. My point was that you can... but you have to surrender some of the player-decisions in order to ensure the story follows the original plan.

To me, the wrong kind of game would be a LotR game that lets the player decided what kind of person Frodo is... and also lets the player decide which way they want to get to Mordor. You have a start and a finish... but the guts is strewn all over the place..

Blah blah blah... I think I could defend this point until I die

The essential difference between storytelling in games and other media is that games are interactive. Core narrative techniques such as dialogue often serve to remove the players sense of immersion rather than enhance it, for the simple reason that they aren''t interactive. This is very much the case for cutscenes - the most annoying part about MGS2 was the constant cutscenes, and was the reason I never got into it.

Another major difference is the fact that games are a spatial medium. Where traditional narrative is about the unfolding of time, games are about the unfolding and contesting of space. There are a few exceptions to this (what I would call a 4D game), such as Shenmue and possibly Majora''s Mask, but I think they will always remain in the minority.