Posted: May 22, 2012 1:36 pm
Jonathan Blow, the master of condescending time-travel games, highlights some problems with story-telling in games: http://youtu.be/mGTV8qLbBWEepepke wrote:There is some controversy over whether games should tell stories. The guy who wrote http://www.artemis.eochu.com/ is pretty adamantly against it.
I'm pretty sympathetic to what he's saying. I think the point for me is that, if I want an absorbing narrative game, I the player have to work with it, and so the obligation of the game designer is to make sure I can do that in a way that is intuitive, predictable and consistent. Deus Ex failed for me, not because I could carry an American flag around with me everywhere I went, but because the only consistent model I have of the main character is one where I side with the government over the terrorists.