Deconstructing the Best Interactive Storytelling

A panel of developers (Marc Laidlaw, Steve Meretzky and ex-BioWare’s Ken Rolston) looked at storytelling at GDC in an attempt to underline the important storytelling can have for games. To stress the point the panel dissected a few games, including BioShock, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Planescape: Torment.

Planescape Torment was Ken Rolston’s pick, and he introduced it’s plot humourously: (You are THE NAMELESS ONE, I’m saying it like that so you know it’s all capital letters.)

(This is a long game, whatever it’s [sic] virtues are,) he continued, (RPGS are the epics or the novels of gaming. But this a game where you can collect your own intestines — you can collect body parts and use them as weapons — they even have stuff written on them! A weapon that’s your own body part that has exposition on it! It’s delicious!)

He concluded, (we will never see it’s like again — it’s like Moby Dick, you’ve done it once, you don’t need it again. It’s like Chinese literature . certainly in terms of the quality of the commentary on it — it enriches and becomes part of it.)

Rouse enjoyed the explorable text aspect of it: (I certainly didn’t finish it but I liked how it’s really quite funny, even with some really serious subject matter,) while Laidlaw felt it (joins the racks of great works of literature, like the Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina that I will never finish.)

Inspiring.