Other Considerations

This section wraps up the discussion of interactive stories by addressing the frustrated author syndrome and episodic and serial delivery, and includes a few thoughts about how the industry may tell stories in the future.

The Frustrated Author Syndrome

Game designers who would really rather be authors in noninteractive media—would-be movie directors, for example—often make a couple of key mistakes when writing interactive stories. First, they tend to write linear stories while pretending to themselves and to the players that the story offers more agency than it really does, promising a big role for the player and then actually giving him almost none at all. The game Critical Path illustrates this problem; its introduction suggests that the player gets to do all kinds of exciting things when in fact its story is so rigidly linear that the avatar dies every time the player deviates from the storyline in any way. (Rumors say that the developers named the game Critical Path in an effort to justify this weakness.)