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Originally Posted by Jake
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."
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That's because "Whoa I totally took my motorcycle off a jump and the cop landed in the water" isn't a story at all, it's an anecdote.
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Originally Posted by some writer named Karen Hertzberg
The difference between anecdote and story is that while anecdotes describe an event in an interesting or humorous way, fiction must achieve something more.
Stories are not about events--stories are about the human needs and emotions that precipitate events. Sure, things happen in stories, but without including human desires and passions, they're simply anecdotes.
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Original article.
I attended most of the same panels that Jake did at GDC, and to me the unifying issue seemed to be that no one had an answer about how to make story in games stronger. They were all able to point out that most of today's games do not have immersive stories, but were kinda fuzzy on how to fix it (I guess it's an academic's job to come up with questions, not answers...)
By far, though, one of my favorite insights was this comment by Tim Schafer, when confronted with the issue that publishers tend to shy away from "story" in games because story is not considered a big seller: "It's not the publisher's job to be experimental. It's the developer's job to be sneaky about being experimental. Pitch the conservative stuff and put the experiments in anyway." In other words, sneak in the story. Fine with me, as long as it makes it in there.
-emily
