April 29, 2004

Sam Lake on Video Game Storytelling

Jive Magazine interviews Sam Lake (writer for videogames, including Max Payne 1 and Max Payne 2 [review]) on what it takes to be a good storyteller for the increasingly complex narrative spaces of videogames).

Here's a clip from Max Payne 2:

“There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'why me?' and 'what if?' when you look back, see the braches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or a forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions."

"All this time we got the fable of sleeping beauty wrong. The prince doesn’t kiss her to wake her up. No one who has slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up. It was the other way around. He kisses her to wake himself up, from the nightmare that has brought him there."

"I was compelled to give [him] his gun back, one bullet at a time.”

And one from the interview:
As games become more and more mainstream entertainment, and the budgets grow larger, the importance of good writing will also grow. That does not mean that bad writing would go away. There will always be games that have been written well, and games that have not been written so well. Just look at movies.

[via Slashdot] Posted by johndan at April 29, 2004 06:12 PM | TrackBack