Interactive Storytelling & Games

[crissxross]

Below is a link to a lecture by Chris Crawford that's well worth watching. He's been innovating in the field of interactive storytelling and games for the past 30 years or more. He created a number of important games in the 1980s but became disillusioned with the computer game industry and left to pursue his own ambitious experiments in interactive storytelling.

http://youtu.be/ajz_1TqccYA

Here's a quote about the difference between stories and games from his book, The Art of Computer Game Design:

… a game is distinguished from a story by the network of options that a game has, as opposed to the single richly-developed thread of a story. Much of the quality of a story is derived from the richness of the information it contains. A story is thus all information and no processing. A game derives its quality from the richness of the network of options it presents. These options are only accessible through the process-intensive aspects of the game. Games that are information-rich and process-poor are closer to stories than to the ideal game.