– Story is what players remember, at the end of a game, about what their characters did in a game.
– But what most players in most games remember is the story they wrote, not a story the designer wrote.
Quotes about stories
My own feelings about the future is that mechanisms will take second place to story-telling. You can already see that happening with the number of Legacy games on the market.
I find it easier to design a game around a clearly defined story, whether this be from history or a work of fiction. History is so rich in interesting stories that there is no end to the games you could come up with.
I like all kinds of stories. I like to read, hear, and watch them. Before becoming a game designer, I wanted to write stories. I have kept this love for stories in my career as a game designer.
With the advent of computer games, story, and gameplay, two age-old enterprises with very different sets of rules, show a similar duality. Storytellers are now faced with a medium where they cannot be certain what path their story will take, just as the physicists found that they could no longer be certain what path their electrons would take. Both groups can now only speak in terms of probabilities.