February 09, 2004
Do Games Need Stories?
"“Do games need stories? No! Any questions?” starts LucasArts producer Haden Blackman. Odd first words, perhaps, for the keystone panel of a conference on storytelling and computer games."
A nice summary of the panel discussion with Will Wright, Haden Blackman, and Sheldon Pacotti at the Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences event at Stanford on Friday.
Posted by kurt at February 9, 2004 12:17 PMComments
Good article! This touches on many ideas we are discussing in 518 and 564 this term.
Posted by: Andrew at February 9, 2004 04:57 PM
And another insightful summary of the whole conference by Brandon Rickman here:
http://www.antimodal.com/archives/000029.html
Posted by: sfisher at February 9, 2004 06:39 PM
The words "game" and "story" mean so many different things to so many different people that I'm suspicious that any discourse about them is mostly Babble.
Do games require score-keeping? Winning and losing? Play? (another such word)
I once told Glorianna D that she uses the word story to mean whatever she likes (this after she stated that non-narrative cinema such as Maya Daren, and Kandinsky paintings, are stories).
I feel more creative and productive by grounding such discussions in constraints, or specifics, or (better) real work.
Posted by: naimark at February 10, 2004 06:51 AM
It's good to see how current and relevant our studies are this semester. These articles are insightful and interesting.
thnx :)
Posted by: erin at February 11, 2004 01:22 PM
In reading the article, I got the same feeling as Michael Naimark. Particularly, it all broke down for me when they said "story is bad, storytelling is good." Now it made sense in the specific context of their discussion, but it fails in the blanket statement that "Games don't need stories." In the end, it all comes down to semantics.
Posted by: Michael Steffen at February 12, 2004 05:51 PM
