[After a brisk nap]

Originally Posted by squarejawhero

They're great "moments" - but "story" is too strong a word. They don't impact on the plot in any way.

Well, it did. The story I experienced when playing Tom Raider included a scene with a lion stalking me. The story Ken Levine experienced when playing X-COM included a tense scene where the battered team rushed in to take out the alien commander.

A story isn't just determined by how it begins and how it ends. All the stuff that happens in the middle is important too.

I've read a few comics based on computer games (Legend of Zelda, Tomb Raider, DOOM, ...), and it always strikes me that they don't adapt the scripted plot of the game. They adapt the gameplay, and use situations that may occur while playing the game. Penny Arcade has made a career out of telling small stories inspired by gameplay.

Originally Posted by Jake

I don't know where I stand on the "gamers tell the story" thing. People really really like to say that gamers tell their own story in a game - it was mentioned in a very large percentage of the panels and sessions I attended at this year's GDC - but I really don't know if it's true. Or, if it is true, I don't know if gamers really see it that way. "Whoa I totally took my motorcycle off a jump and the cop landed in the water" is an awesome thing to recount to your friend (especially if s/he too plays the game and knows what you're talking about), but I think gamers equate that with "cool thing I did" more than "a story."

I guess my stance on that is that if you tell it to a friend, then it's "a story". I agree that people tend to think of "the story" primarily as the scripted elements, but that's because in most games that's where the major developments happen. My feeling is that when major plot points happen in-gameplay, those things are accepted as part of the story.

Take a game like Civilization (whichever Roman numeral you like). What's the story of a game of Civ? I guess some would say it doesn't have a story, but I still have memories of protracted land wars, protégé empires, abortive colonizations and squashed uprisings. It's the kind of story you might find in a history book rather than in a novel, but that's the nature of the game. The scripted story chunks in Civ are at such a low level that any meaningful story is almost completely emergent.

Originally Posted by Jake

It makes me wonder how many people who say that have really ever played a good interactive story that's "on rails," because to me there is a huge very tangible difference between playing an interactive story with a set plot and watching a film with a set plot.

I've certainly played a lot of very linear games (I'm an adventure gamer, after all), and I still believe there's a bright future for emergent stories in computer games. I don't experience games with linear stories as quite so different from watching films with linear stories as you do, but I agree that the difference is there.

Originally Posted by Jake

It's a very simple, possibly stupid example, but I don't think people consider it (or at least don't give that matter enough weight) when they say that the only good interactive story is an emergent one.

I don't know who's said that. I certainly haven't.