Gamasutra - News - GDC Online: Neal Stephenson On The Future Of Games And Narrative

via gamasutra.com

Excerpt:

"The Future of Games and Writing

"I suspect that in 10 or 20 years, we'll look back on that as a kind of transitional phase into something where the story can actually develop and not just constantly kind of reset and replay," said Stephenson in the onstage Q&A.

"If you're trying to create canned cutscenes, the tree of possibilities gets so huge that you can't do it that way... Where we need to get is a place where you can tell the story as you go along, like in the old-school pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons style of game."

"I'd love it if we could get to a place where you can kind of create your own story; where you're more fully simulating the entire world to the point where there's total freedom to act out whatever story you want. I think that's going to be a long time in coming," he said.

"By definition what a writer is doing is laying out a series of events that is then not changeable, so that's actually a really fundamental and interesting question as such," he commented -- what the writer's job is at all.

"Clearly the world-building part of it is always going to work," he said. "If the stories of games become more interactive, writers still have a good sense of how to set up a story..."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales