Interactive Storytelling for Video Games

CHAPTER

Fourteen

What Players Really Want: The Most Important Issue

As you’ve seen in the last two chapters, good arguments can be made for the supremacy of both player-driven and traditional storytelling methods in games. It’s quite likely that you have your own thoughts on which side makes the better case. When I first began researching this subject, I found myself more in line with the pro–traditional storytelling group, but I also saw that both sides based many of their key arguments on assumptions of what players wanted and enjoyed most in stories (freedom and control vs. a structured and well-told story). The problem was that although everyone was saying “players want this” or “players want that,” as far as I could tell, no one had done ...