BioWare Interview

GamesIndustry.biz managed to corner the BioWare doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk for a Q&A about the future of video games, hardware innovations, storytelling, and more.

Q: Do you think a good, meaningful story is possible in an ever-changing world that all users can change?

Ray Muzyka: I think a great story is possible, because if you think about it, the narrative is actually possible in multiple directions. There’s a social narrative between players, there’s the external narrative outside of the game with social networking. And then there’s the internal narrative of the choices you make, and then there’s the internal narrative of the story arch being created and kind of evolving over time, both on the player’s user-generated content and the way they make choices and their impact on the world, but also the developers actually create a story arch that has some kind of purpose or overarching goal to it. So you can look at it almost like an onion with multiple layers of narrative, and that’s one of the reasons why I think interactive fiction is so exciting, because it has those multiple layers that aren’t really possible or as achievable in a more passive, linear medium. They can have good stories as well, but I think there are different kinds of narratives that are deeply exciting, in some ways more exciting, in non-linear fiction.

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Q: Can you tell a meaningful story in a game without any text or dialogue?

Ray Muzyka: Sure. You can have different kinds of narrative there outside dialogue and characterisation as well. If you look at a game like BioShock, a lot of the narrative delivery there was exciting to us because it was delivered through the environments and interactions and how the character experienced the world, which was pretty neat. We were inspired by that, and are trying to do more and more of that ourselves. We did before, but we’re looking more closely as there are other ways to deliver narrative in games. And frankly sometimes the more subtle ones are the more powerful, the ones that leave a lot to the imagination. So it’s almost gone full-circle from the old text adventure games back in the 80s where there was a lot left to the imagination in terms of what things look like to now where we have some dialogue and some text sometimes but it feels like you’re wandering through a real environment, whether it’s a fantasy or science fiction world, or through China, or whatever setting it is that we’ve created for players. If you can make it feel like it’s natural and seamless, then the possibilities are only really limited by your imagination.