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Old 06-22-2006, 11:13 PM   #50
Steve Ince
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Don't get me wrong, what you're saying is an excellent way of developing content and narrative in many ways. What I'm trying to question is whether the approach is the right one. I'm just very wary of anything that distances the end product from the creative individuals. One of the reasons that so many games look the same has nothing to do with the talent of the artists but that they all use the same tools and similar rendering pipelines. If we start applying this to narrative we'll end up with games that have forumulaic stories.

There are many screenwriting books that tell you that your screenplay must be 120 pages long and the inciting incident should happen on pages 6-10 and that the whole thing must be split into three acts. The good screenwriters worry less about this - if they followed the forumula we wouldn't get films like Seven, Witness, Talk Show, Fight Club, Memento, or Raiders of the Lost Ark (which actually has seven acts).
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