Jason Pitre recorded the GenCon seminar that Matt Forbeck, Stan!, and I gave on the intersection of games and stories. Check it out (along with the audio of a few other seminars, all recorded with permission) at Jason’s Genesis of Legend Publishing website.
(In addition to recording these, Jason was also the eBay hero who bought my GenCon ENnie dream date.)
Thanks for the link and I hope people find the recording useful.
Great seminar Jeff, and thanks Jason.
One of the highlights for me was Matt’s point about the ‘tacked-on’ nature of a significant proportion of video game stories. Its something that I’m sure is widely recognised by story-minded players and developers alike, and will likely always effect part of the industry that sees games and stories as separate but parallel entities – the former being the ‘core’ of the experience, the latter being little more than semantic/dramatic ‘window dressing’. In Matt’s words:
“…I think that’s bad design. I think if you’re going to do a game every mechanic has to be true to the story and the stories need to be true to the mechanic. In really good games they all mesh together and they don’t jar you out of the experience.”
Precisely. Though things are gradually changing on this front, my gut feeling as a player is that this point still needs to be more strongly represented to many of the people who hold the purse strings in video game development. Attention to the story/game gestalt can be of incalculable benefit to a player’s experience of the end product. Simply put, writers/artists included early in the process and resourced appropriately can make games better experiences.