Everything is Possible - Storytelling in Games

Gamespot has a thoughtful and interesting piece up entitled Everything is Possible, where they interview several game designers with a strong storytelling background. The interviewees include Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), Ken Levine (System Shock 2), Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango), and Ragnar Tørnquist (The Longest Journey). These gaming luminaries discuss the finer points of creating a plot in an interactive universe, and it makes for a fantastic read. From the article: "Ken Levine: I'll never forget the first story I wrote in gaming. It was for a (eventually canceled) Star Trek: Voyager game. I wrote the opening cutscene, which included this gem: THE CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON JANEWAY...WE SEE A LOOK OF TERROR IN HER EYES AS IT REFLECTS THE INCOMING MISSILE The lead programmer pretty much laughed in my face. First of all, our characters were low-resolution bitmaps, with one fixed expression on their face. Their eyes were maybe 4x4 pixels each. The camera zooming in on that wouldn't have shown a performance; they would have shown a scattered mess of random pixels."

Comments

Slashdot's weird story system

[ZephyrXero]

How come this article is not on the front page!? ...luckily, being a registered user, I can set all games articles to show up on my page, but shouldn't this count as one of the better game articles? I'm willing to bet a large portion of Slashdot readers don't log in and just see whatever's put on the front page is the reason that this is a problem... Maybe Slashdot should let it's users moderate whether or not an article is good or not (front page worthy) too?