Crawford maintains many times throughout his book that interactive storytelling and games are two very different things, and denounces games as proper storytelling mediums at several points. While he gives credit to games' evolution through the years, he dare not give them as much credit as they deserve (at least in my opinion). Many of the techniques that he lists that are "flawed" ways of diversifying an interactive storyworld are techniques that Lee talks about extensively and encourages for enriching a video game. (It's important that I mention that I know Crawford is talking about interactive story engines; very different things in his opinion than video games. But, the point for me is to take lessons for both and enrich my game designing, which is why I'm reading these books in the first place).
Crawford says that simply filling your world with characters is a hollow way of adding depth, and while this is correct, Lee encourages this practice as long as you're taking the time to add depth and dimension to the NPCs. I believe that there is truth to both statements, as there's nothing more worthless than NPCs who give the one piece of information they're programmed to give and then repeat it over and over. While it's impossible when populating a game world to make every character live and breath and speak like a normal person with feelings and thought patterns, it is possible to select the characters that will truly be important to the story and the world and make them 3-dimensional and worthy of the player's empathy.
Although, the two authors do seem to agree on one thing: branching storylines and dialog are usually a mistake, but for different reasons. Crawford says that people usually don't like it because of the workload involved, while Sheldon says that the idea is a good one but usually poorly implemented. And from reading the responses in the discussion boards at school about what the students think contribute to interactivity, many of them happened to mention branching storylines and dialog with different outcomes help greatly with it.
But, I'm often thinking about why Crawford's book was chosen in a course about storytelling in video games, not interactive stories, which are a completely different medium. Chris Crawford's storytelling engine that he's worked on for the better part of two decades is centered around a totally different goal, which is the pursuit of a truly interactive and immersive story, which he has taken plenty of time to separate boldly from video games altogether. This is fine. Many of these concepts can certainly be applied to enriching the stories that we game designers create every day in our work, and I feel as I've walked away with much more wisdom than when I entered the class. As a mainstream industry, there are few examples of truly famous interactive stories. I feel that the closest that we've come to the concept in this generation of gaming has been Heavy Rain, a title that feels much more like an interactive movie than a video game.
What do I think? I'm a story kind of guy. I like linear stories, and games with linear stories. Far more of the games that I associate with and love are linearly told stories than games that have multiple endings. Personally I think that video games can be a great vessel for telling a great story, as the person who wrote it intended. I feel like I'm in an increasing minority on this one, as lots of players tend to "skip" the hell out of cutscenes even when they haven't seen them before or experienced the story at all. They just want to shoot crap and get on with the gameplay. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But, I think that there's just as much duty to providing a fantastic story that IS there to be experienced, no matter whether the player gives a damn or if they truly are looking for a great story to touch their heart. This is what I want to have a hand in. Making great stories, with excellent worlds to employ them in.
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