Story Or Design?

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
-Frank Lloyd Wright

I gave a talk at Queensland University of Technology today on writers in the video game industry. It felt very strange. It is usually the other way around. Usually you hear from people who want to be designers but are really writers. They tell you about their ideas but they are nothing but story ideas bereft of any actual game design. I can’t count the number of time somebody said they were going tell me about their game design idea and then launch off into an elaborate story summary.

So now had to do the reverse and talk to a bunch of writers and trying to explain how wrap a story around a game design. I wish had more time to prepare, but I did come up with some interesting trains of thought coming at the subject from this angle.

I was going to go on about it now but I’m still recovering from our 12:01 AM Star Wars Episode III showing night before last and I am literally falling asleep at the keyboard. I’ll continue thinking about it for awhile and write something up a little more formally.