"This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell." Lester Dent was the creator of Doc Savage, and wrote a LOT of pulp fiction.

"Sycorax is a Twitter client, written in Python, that choreographs the online behavior of fictional characters. Other tweet schedulers make your personal Twitter stream look like a clockwork robot is behind it, posting tweets at the optimal time for penetration into your social network. Syxorax lets fictional characters use Twitter the way real people do. Your characters can post at odd hours and talk to each other, taking their lines from a simple script you write, but without any ongoing work from you." Very nice.

"Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.

"Books become clouds, raining events and built forms onto the city." This is marvellous

Jamie Fristrom on collaborative-storytelling-RPGs. Lots of good links and thoughts here - especially the line about White Wolf's "disenfranchising" of the player by calling the GM (of all people) a "storyteller".

"...what Civilization provides is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, which is three times more than what you probably started with. If you play the game in particularly interesting way, then you can be rewarded with a delightful, surprising experience that you can’t help but weave into a story, inventing characters and lovers and intrigues all round. This story might tug at you so insistently that you begin to jot down notes and timelines, writing diary entries and newspaper reports of battles. Eventually, you might join all those pieces up, rewrite them, throw it all away, and rewrite it again – and then you might call yourself a storyteller." And this is one of the kinds of storytelling that games are best at: collaborative tales weaved between ruleset and player, between man and machine.

Lovely: roleplaying Ferris Bueller not only on Twitter, but also on Foursquare. I love that Foursquare has a policy to allow "fake check-ins but not to reward them points"; there's lots of potential there, both playful and storyful.

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"I'm continually drawn in by the belief that everyone finds their own way through life, age, cities, networks, whatever. And as Meehan's tale recounts, it's the whispers we leave on the wind that entice others to follow our hints." Just go and read the story; it's wonderful, and the fragments George picks out so carefully constructed. That made my evening.

"Storytelling began as ceremony and evolved into ritual. It was commercialised in the middle ages, became big business in the 19th century and an international industry in the 20th. Today it is the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era." I still think there's some separation of plot/narrative to be considered, you can't deny Schrader makes some sensible points.

"Another word for "pacing" is "storytelling". We never really tell stories to players; we just put them in games. Then players tell our stories to themselves." Interesting analysis of pacing in games, and what the demands games make on pace are. And, of course, that quotation.

"This is a mod. And that’s kind of relevant, for two reasons. Firstly, we don’t want to pay for this kind of thing. Hell, look at The Path: people are upset that even exists, let alone that its developers had the guts to charge seven quid for their remarkable efforts. But this is the sort of thing I’d love to pay for. It seems illogical that we’ll all happily splash out fifty pounds for the same old story of science-fiction revenge, yet aggressively avoid anything that encourages us to engage our brains and challenge ourselves a little."

Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.

This looks very, very interesting. Yes, it's IF, but it looks like it's pushing that genre quite far.

"There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story." Excellent Emily Short piece on Blue Lacuna

"This Prince of Persia is many things good and bad, but for me, it has been one of the more enthralling experiences provided by a video game. It eschews frustrating, punishing gameplay tropes, and instead follows a hugely unpopular and successful (at its aim) path: it aims to create a continuous, enjoyable, flowing experience, one unhindered by the mechanical, artificial traditions of “achievement” and “fun” that so many games cling to."

"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."

"...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."

...and here's a tiny bit that got cut from the final interviewer, from Tom Chick's own site. Spielberg talks in more detail about balancing storytelling and gameplay, and expands a bit on the cutscene problem.

Tom Chick interviews Spielberg on games for Yahoo!. Spielberg is consumate and smart, as you'd expect, but also well-grounded; he really does _play games_. "Yes, I've played Half-Life, of course" - the "of course" is the important bit.

"The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling." 3000+ photographs, with what seems like a confusing-and-shiny interface to explore them - but hides a detailed metadata manipulation layer underneath. Beautiful pictures, too. Something really quite special; the "interface" pages should explain more.

"...the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."

"So why am I mentioning this now? Because Alternity has just started. This is a new Harry Potter game, and it starts from the beginning -- September 1, Harry's first day at school. Only not as in The Philosopher's Stone. In this scenario, Voldemort, er, won." Fanfic-cum-alt-universe-RPGs in the Potterverse being run solely on Livejournal. Amazing.

"Narrative, like play, is one of the most basic tools we posses as human beings for coping with experience. And just as play can be fundamentally empowering, there is something distinctly empowering about using the tools of narrative to throw a net of meaning over our lives."

"We’ve forgotten that our ability to engage with something is a gift inherent to human perception, and instead we’ve attempted to replace that form of engagement with a derivative technological form of interaction."

"if the player identifies with the protagonist and is motivated by the desire for the protagonist to "win" or "succeed", how can satisfying interactive tragedy exist? Won't the player always be trying to avoid actions that propel the story to an unhappy conclusion? What can an interactive tragedy offer to the player in place of traditional metrics of success?" Emily Short on making tragedy playable.

"...a video game is a box of possibilities, and the best stories told are those that arise from the player expressing his own agency within a functional, believable gameworld."

"One of the reasons that sports have a such a reign over our imagination is that they feed into our love of storytelling. Sports are made to create situations with narrative significance: last-minute reversals, falls from grace, chances for redemption."

"I thought this decision to attach a reward to the choice represented a failure of nerve on the part of the designers ... wedding a gameplay-reward to a decision that ought be governed by one's sense of character and motivation."

"By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all."

Pat Redding is Narrative Designer on Far Cry 2. This is his presentation from GDC 2008, with full notes. It's very, very good: all about designing story in an open-world environment. Lots of detail. Designers: you need to read this.

"I'm not terribly interested in proving Kojima a genius, but I believe we can accurately call him an auteur, and it's this aspect of his nature as an artist that has me thinking about D.W. Griffith and some interesting parallels between the two."

"MGS4 is the game that contains everything Hideo Kojima knows about game design and storytelling - and that is precisely what's so thrillingly right and so damnably wrong with it. Faced with a myriad of choices [...] Kojima chose not to choose. "

"What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater." Some sensible analysis; such a shame we need to write things like this.

"The holy grail for me now wouldn't be the game that can create infinite story - but a game that could procedurally generate infinite interesting content." Jamie Fristrom on games and storytelling. Good stuff.

"Every single point along that road is wrong. And every single point along that road takes games somewhere expensive and difficult. [...] Emotionally complex games are great, but so are emotionally crude - or indeed emotionally barren - games." Excellent.

"The result is a casual game with surprisingly nuanced and interesting characters, with whom the player begins to feel she has a real relationship -- even though all the dialogue occurs in cut scenes which we have no ability to alter." Excellent.

"It's not quite a game, and while it does have branching, it doesn't allow the reader to affect the outcome of story - only their own experience of it." Adrian Hon on writing something better than Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Some lovely visible thinking.

""When people tell me about playing a game and tell me what happened to them, then I hear how different their stories are," he says. "To me, that's an indicator of how good the game is."" Will Wright hits the nail on the head.

"...supporting the retelling of experiences is important. After all if you’re offering a cool product or service, you want others to know about it. A passionate user is probably your best advocate." More great stuff from Kars.

"Adventures in particpatory, interactive, rock'n'roll storytelling." Guy's talk in fulltext format. Nicely done, Guy.

"If you approach design not as embedding your story in the environment, but as creating an environment wherein users can create their own stories, then I’d say you’re on the right track." Kars on playful IA again.

"Fray is being reborn as a quarterly printed book, and we need your help." A great move from Derek Powazek

"He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden".

Awesome - players decided to take d20 (D&D) entirely metaphorically, and use it to play out 60s social archetypes. To quote further down the thread: "you've made D&D... narrativist". Great stuff.

Must read this - games and storytelling. Bruce is currently blowing me away at Etech06