I love play­ing video games. If they’re well done, that is. And that’s the really dif­fi­cult part. What ele­ments must a game have to make you love it? Kick-ass graph­ics? A good plot? Free­dom of choice? An inno­v­a­tive inter­ac­tion sys­tem? Intu­itive con­trols? Cin­e­mato­graphic sequences? And there are many more things peo­ple name when asked why they like a game. One of my all-time heroes, War­ren Spec­tor, the cre­ative mind behind great games like Wing Com­man­der, Sys­tem Shock, Deus Ex, and Thief, yes­ter­day gave a talk about writ­ing and nar­ra­tives in games at the GDC. Gama­su­tra has the essen­tial bits over here. The guys from Next Gen­er­a­tion have a story too.

They also have an inter­view with War­ren which is very infor­ma­tive. There he makes a point of hav­ing “a unique expe­ri­ence”. In short, inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling is what it really boils down to. I don’t need the most beau­ti­ful and amaz­ing graph­ics engine avail­able today to enjoy a game if the story enthralls me. By the way, there’s a short sum­mary of dif­fer­ent sto­ry­telling tech­niques over at Next Gen­er­a­tion. In ret­ro­spect, you should also have a look at this arti­cle which tack­les the emo­tional side of games.

On a side note, War­ren also men­tioned a new method of episodic dis­tri­b­u­tion he thought of for a long time. Well, his plans were thwarted by peo­ple who obvi­ously don’t have a clue. Accord­ing to Spec­tor, all the answer he ever got was some­thing like “it’s five years to early for this”. Unbe­liev­able, isn’t it? I always though they want to make a shit­load of money. At least, War­ren is con­vinced that dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion and episodic con­tent are a big part of our future. And I def­i­nitely agree with him that cur­rently nobody is approach­ing devel­op­ment in the best way to do things episodically.

Gamers should demand more depth and free­dom in games. Any­body who tells me that qual­ity doesn’t sell is short-sighted to the extreme. Per­haps, if the qual­ity goes up the num­ber of soft­ware pirates goes down? To my mind, peo­ple rather down­load a game than pay for it if they think it’s not worth the money. Nei­ther will I buy a game I can beat within 10 hours nor am I going to buy that such a game for my kids. A game has to offer more than just a few hours of amaz­ing graph­ics which seems to be a really sad trend right now. That’s why the term next-gen is so ridicu­lous. It’s next-gen graph­ics only and that’s not going to help. I want next-gen story-telling and next-gen inter­ac­tion. I want to roam a vir­tual world with the pos­si­bil­ity to to what­ever I like to do.