While interviewing Ken Levine earlier this month for my story on the use of objectivism in BioShock we talked quite a bit about the plot. Near the end of the interview I found myself compelled to tell Levine what I thought of the game.

"I know I'm not a game developer, I just write about games," I said to Levine, steeling myself for his reaction. "But I wasn't exactly thrilled with the ending of the game. I felt like the confrontation with Ryan, the deneumont of the story, should have probably been the game's ending. It felt like you dragged it out too much after that and it ended up watering down the experience."

Then I waited, for a second, in silence before hearing Levine say he agreed.

"I underestimated, way underestimated, the impact the story was going to have on people," he said. "I didn't realize it would change people's perspective on what to expect from gameplay."

Levine said that when writing a story, deep down he never really expect people to pay attention to it.

"I didn't think they became that invested in what was going on," he said. In BioShock "you have this great mystery of your own identity and once it is solved the story is over."

"I think it was a miscalculation on my part."

I'm still a little shocked that Levine so readily agreed with me about the ending of his game, which is why I'm all the more intrigued to hear what he has to say later this morning during his Game Developers Conference talk about BioShock and storytelling.

Make sure to stay tuned to my impressions after it wraps up.

No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock [Kotaku]

As the videogames industry reaches further and further into the mass market, the old assumptions become less and less useful. Publishers who expect to reach a casual market must abandon to some extent their employees' traditional assumptions of what constitutes a videogame, which almost without exception consists of said employees projecting their personal play preferences for competitive play onto a wider audience who may not share this bias ....

Understanding emotions of play is a crucial new aspect of game design, which goes hand-in-hand with understanding the diversity of play styles. The sooner the games industry wakes up to this commercial reality, the sooner we can achieve a more stable base to the market.

There's certainly been plenty of theoretical and downright fantastical mulling on the subject of designers evoking emotion without falling back on cinematic techniques or storytelling, but the 'four keys' (and subsequent responses) is a reasonably practical and applicable framework for designing better games.

Emotions of Play Revisited [Only A Game]

For those who haven't played Episode Two, it begins with a quick summary of the events of Episode One. That's extremely helpful, as I'd completed that portion of the post-Half-Life 2 trilogy almost 18-months ago. Rather than having to re-read some FAQ, check the Wikipedia entry on the episode, or, God forbid, look into the recesses of my gray matter for the plot synopsis, Valve provides a quick, pre-rendered brush up. Why don't more games do this?

In the case of something like Super Mario Galaxy, it might not be warranted, as the kidnapping of Princess Peach and subsequent gathering of shiny things to rescue her has formed a storytelling groove in my noodle by now. However, in the case of games whose stories require dozens of hours of gameplay—Mass Effect, Final Fantasy XII—or span multiple console generations—Metal Gear Solid, Halo—an in-game cinematic Cliffs Notes wouldn't just be welcome, I now find it unacceptable to not have access to it.

There are plenty of games that I simply never finish or revisit simply because my interest in wrapping up the storyline seems like a chore. Who's that guy? Where am I going? Who's betraying me now? Look, I've got a dozen games in my backlog and I'm simply not interested in keeping notes or hitting up GameFAQs for a refresher course.

Please, storytellers, give me a quickly accessible recap of the game's events and an easy way to access it. Ideally, I'd like to, at any point, be given an edited selection of cinematic moments of your game, not unlike something I'd see at the beginning of an episode of 24 or Lost.

Admittedly, I'm not aware of what games may actually do this currently, as my personal tastes have turned away from long, story driven games, in part because of this annoyance. Maybe our helpful commenters can clue me in to games that already do this (or do something better).

End rant!

William Vitka over at CBS's GameCore has an ambitiously fascinating piece up on gaming and storytelling. He puts forth the question of whether or not video games will ever have a Citizen Kane moment. "My first response is to ask whether the analogy is the right one," Henry Jenkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells Vitka. "If the question is, 'Will video games become a serious art form in their own right?' I think the answer is inevitably yes."

Graphic novelist Warren Ellis is less optimistic, saying, "Great storytelling begins and ends with the storyteller, not the physics engine or the rendering," he says." It could be argued that great storytelling and rendering are not mutually exclusive. The same could be said of CGI and storytelling in film. "But let's be straight," Ellis says. "You're not going to get anything on the level of Kane in video games until someone somewhere pays an honest-to-God writer to sit in a room and create a story themselves that they are passionate about telling through game play and visual narrative."

Once again, the validity of such a comparison is brought forth. Vitka writes that the problem of discussing video games and stories is that "we have never had a storytelling medium like video games." Jamil Moledina, director of the Game Developers Conference, concedes and says, "Game playing represents the hybrid of both aspects of storytelling, where the audience is empowered to self-propagate the storytelling creation and enjoyment. This stimulates their own creativity and gives them the experience of controlling their destiny." And that is what makes a good video game.

Full Piece Here [GameCore]