Two panels discussed the importance and state of storytelling in video games at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The first covered the place of story in the developing medium of games, and the second looked at examples of good storytelling in games.

The Future of Story in Game Design

A panel Thursday discussed the future of story in video game development, reported Gamasutra. Deborah Todd led the panel, which included Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights and Saber 3D’s Matthew Karch, as well as Tim Willits from iD Software and Matt Costello from Polar Productions.

“I think story should serve the gameplay, and not the other way,” said Karch. “In the shooter genre, which I’m in, I don’t think anyone really cares about the story. I don’t think in some genres it’s especially important.” Karch’s team recently released “Timeshift.”

“In 5 to 10 years I don’t think there’s going to be a shooter genre. It’s going to be more literary,” argued Dyack. “A shooter would just be ‘action’.”

Dyack said story will become the dominant element in game design. “Games are the eighth art form: the glue is interactivity, and that aspect is something that makes our industry unique and there’s a huge misconception at this industry is that gameplay is everything. These people are going to be mistaken,” he said. “And as this industry matures content and story, as it did in the 30s and 40s with cinema, will become dominant.”

To Willits, the differences between the industries of film and games are too great for a comparison to be made. “Working with a designer and a team is very different from the way you make a movie. Movies are a consistent process compared to how dynamic game creation is,” he said.

It’s true that the size of a game development team can inhibit their creativity. Hopefully, better technology and development tools in the future will allow smaller teams to make great looking games with full creative license and greater involvement from the writers, unimpeded by technical limitations.

The Best of Interactive Storytelling

A Wednesday panel under Midway’s Richard Rouse titled “Deconstructing the Best Interactive Storytelling” set out to dispel the myths that video games are an inadequate medium for spinning a good yarn, reported Gamasutra. The panel included Valve’s Marc Laidlaw, Blue Fang’s Steve Meretzky and Ken Rolston of Big Huge Games. Each of the three panelists chose and discussed eight games that demonstrated good storytelling.

Laidlaw nominated “Thief: Deadly Shadows.” “The thing that they did the best was an amazing job on the atmosphere,” he said. “Another thing they did especially well at the time was understanding the limitation of the cut scenes [at the time] and used silhouettes with limited animation.”

Rouse commented on the detracting quality of the game’s antiquated graphics, saying, “It’s supposed to be grounded in reality but it looks like a quake level.”

Ken Rolston picked “Planescape Torment.” “You are THE NAMELESS ONE. I’m saying it like that so you know it’s all capital letters,” he said. “RPGS are the epics or the novels of gaming. But this a game where you can collect your own intestines — you can collect body parts and use them as weapons — they even have stuff written on them! A weapon that’s your own body part that has exposition on it! It’s delicious!”

“We will never see it’s like again — it’s like Moby Dick, you’ve done it once, you don’t need it again,” Rolston continued. “It’s like Chinese literature … certainly in terms of the quality of the commentary on it — it enriches and becomes part of it.”

Finally, Rouse picked what many people consider to be one of the most emotional games of all time: ICO. “there’s almost no dialogue in the game at all, but the emotional connection between the characters is a key gameplay mechanic. They pay it off brilliantly at the end of the game,” he said, “you spend so long grabbing her after she nearly misses leaps, feeling it through the controller rumble, and then at the end of the game she grabs you. It really is a stunning moment.”

“The purity of the design of the game was amazing,” Laidlaw agreed, “to design a game so that the rumble of the controller was part of the emotional impact.”

Even Meretzky agreed: “this was inarguably the on that best told its story as a game.”

The conclusion reached by the panel was that video games had not yet achieved the storytelling capability of literature or film, but that these excellent games showed the medium’s promise.