On video games and storytelling

I have Andrew Glassner's Interactive Storytelling which I found very interesting on the topic of storytelling in video games. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that the process of story telling and creating good games are in tension, since games are about giving the player power while good story telling requires authorial power.

[That conflict actually gave me an idea for a game in itself : one where the player is the god who is creating a legend by exercising their power over the life of computer controlled individuals. That makes the player into the author and shifts that exact authorial/player tension into the purpose of the game. Your score is in two parts: 1. the fame of the chosen hero, 2. the happiness of the chosen hero. The end game is that in order to get the highest score in fame, the hero must become aware of your influence in their lives (much of which will have been negative) and gain enough power to destroy you. That's the fun of games, you can often switch around conflicts and make them interesting mechanics.]

There are a number of games I find interesting from a story telling or literary view

* Sleep Is Death http://sleepisdeath.net/

* Passage http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

* Dear Esther http://dear-esther.com/ (which sounds a lot like one of the games described in the article).

* Every day the same dream http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydayt...

These are mainly 'art games', and some, like Dear Esther aren't really games at all, but it's interesting to see more mainstream games getting better storylines and taking emotional engagement more seriously too.

It's been interesting how some recent games like Bastion and Sword and Sworcery have really played with the concept of the narrator.

Eve Online http://www.eveonline.com/ is particuarly exciting from the politics side of story telling, because I've always been hopeful for the possibilities of developers creating a rich enough, persistent universe that players create their own meaningful, epic storylines, and Eve seems to the be the only MMO that has actually managed to pull that off (despite the fact that I find the actual gameplay unbearably dull, as is so often the case with MMOs).

For emotional engagement, simply searching for 'games that made me cry' turns up quite a few stories of strong emotional reactions. The Walking Dead, talked about in the article gets quite a few mentions.