Salman Rushdie Quotes

The moment you start dictating content/themes/story vs. allowing the player to be a participant in the story and carve their own path, you're doing the player a disservice.

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

I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.

Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it's a brand new audience for me.

There are so many games where you fight aliens or zombies, and they have very high-fidelity graphics, but they don't ask the question of why the events are happening.

Games, by nature, have more plot options and non-linear qualities than TV and film.

Stories in which the player doesn't inhabit the main character are difficult for games to handle.

We're growing into an entertainment medium as opposed to 'We make games. We make Mario jump.' We no longer have to focus so hard on the technical hurdles and can ask, as a player, why am I doing this? Why am I making these choices? Games that don't have that strong foundation stumble.

What I'm doing is creating a game. I'm not making a movie. To make the game more enjoyable and captivating, and to make the player feel like he's present in that setting, we need the cinematic element.

It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense.

A game is a series of interesting choices.

The nice thing about a video game is that you can explore the dimensions of a character so much more deeply than you can in a television show or even in a movie.

'Guild Wars 2' is a wider world in that we have a lot of different mechanics available for storytelling. We have our personal story, the story of you, which is tailored for your character. You answer some basic questions; you make some decisions early on, and that follows through.

As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible.

I believe that even today we can only tell a simple story without really interfering with gameplay. But in the future, I think it will almost be a requirement of all storytellers when they create games, how they can tell a more complex story without conflicting with the gameplay.

Playing a character in a video game is different to other performances because your character can't lead the audience of players in one direction.

Some media used to talk about video games only to say how violent or addictive they could be. With 'Heavy Rain,' they talked about the story of the game and the emotions they felt while playing.

I don't hover over the thought of only playing a protagonist.

With video games, imagine it's not locked - it's a TV show people can reach in and do this and do that, and you need to have dialog for all of that stuff.

When you really think about it, it doesn't really matter where a game ends. Ultimately, if the player is satisfied with stopping at a particular point, it doesn't matter if it's where the creator intended things to end or not... and so that's where the idea of having so many endings came about.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.

If you played 'Heavy Rain,' there are very few cutscenes and very few moments where you don't have control.