be the story

My Interview at The Writing Show

Paula B. at The Writing Show a couple weeks ago interviewed me about storytelling in video games. Here’s the podcast audio, and please check out the other fascinating interviews she has over at her site. The Writing Show is one of my favorite podcasts, and one of the few I listen to regularly.

-TimK

Story Games and Empty Reviews

It occurred to me recently that game reviewers ignore story. I don’t think they do it on purpose. I’d like to think they just don’t grok story. Or maybe they think gamers don’t care about story. So they talk about gameplay. They talk about genre, perspective, graphics, audio, controls. But they ignore story. Two examples from videogames.yahoo.com illustrate the point well.

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Favorite Classic Story Games

What do I mean by “story game”? After all, most games now have stories. What differentiates a story game from all the others? By “story game” I mean a game whose story drives the game. In most games, the gameplay is the central element, and the story is there to add flavor. But in story games, the story is the central element, and the gameplay is built around the story. As a result, the story is so tightly integrated with the gameplay that you cannot remove the story and still have a game left.

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Spotlight: The Goat in the Grey Fedora (Review)

The Goat in the Grey Fedora
An on-line story game by Mark Darin, starring Jason Ellis, published by Pinhead Games.

Many of us expect little from adventure games. But the story game is not dead, no siree. In fact, it’s coming back to life. Just as bloggers and podcasters and videobloggers are ushering in a new era of media, on-line game publishers are ushering in a new era of story gaming.

If we expect little from adventure games, we expect even less from free games. But we should not settle. And the second episode in the Nick Bounty series by Pinhead Games neither asks us to settle nor disappoints.

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The Longest Journey (Review)

Or maybe the longest, most arduous, most painful, most distressing journey.

On two different adventure gaming boards recently, the subject has come up, the subject of the classic computer game The Longest Journey. No, I don’t want to call it a classic. But to be fair, it’s only a year younger than Grim Fandango, which is a classic, or destined to be one.

In any case, given that people are newly praising The Longest Journey—not everybody, but many whose memories are perhaps deceiving them—and others are asking whether they should play it now, I dug out some of my notes and comments from half a decade ago, and I’m posting my own review of The Longest Journey here, so you all can call me a carping snob. Though I’d prefer if you just called me “story geek.”

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Spotlight: Psychonauts (Review)

I think I finally know what I want to do with my life. Not my career, but what I do for a mid-life crisis. I want to be Tim Schafer. On the Psychonauts credit sheet, Tim Schafer is listed as “Creative Director.” The creative genius behind such classic story-games as Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango, Tim Schafer and his crack team at Double Fine Productions this year released Psychonauts, a story-based platform game.

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IFComp 2005

This week, we enter the world of interactive fiction, and the possibilities it presents, by way of IFComp 2005. In this episode, we look at two of the top 4 winning entries.

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