Rob Manuel Quotes

It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.

On my long list of hates about RPGs, one of them was, I always felt it was an unnecessary chore to make you care about a world when, in fact, what most players care about is their own personal experience.

I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect games, and that's all about social manipulation and observing people and alliances and relationships.

I had always been intrigued by the emotional aspect of adventure gaming-the fact that people get so personally involved.

The best games came from great characters.

In a movie, you're just passive; you're just watching a story that is told to you. But in games, I saw that you could be the main protagonist: you could be in the shoes of the hero and make the decisions.

The most important thing in games isn't the designer's narrative, but the story the player creates through his experiences.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

You have to decide what kind of story you're going to tell. For instance I would argue a movie like 'Toy Story 3,' which isn't realistic at all, is really emotional and involving. It just depends. I played this game called 'Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP' for iPad that is totally old school 8-bit, which I found very moving.

Big stories need human stakes.

Players are artists who create their own reality within the game.

The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s.

The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story.

I've certainly played games that provoked a real emotional response or serious thought processes.

Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.

I like finishing a movie and having this living, breathing thing.

Whatever kind of movie it is, you're going to be more into it when you care more about the drama, or you'll have a better laugh if you feel like you know the people better.

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

Anytime anyone gets passionate over a character you're playing, I think you've done your job well.

I disagree that injecting emotion into a game comes at the expense of the playing experience.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.