Margaret Weis Quotes

'Heavy Rain' is a cousin of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

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

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

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

The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience.

In the 'Mass Effect' universe, there is zero ad libbing.

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

'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.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

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.

People nowadays think of gamebooks as rather old hat - and, after all, it was twenty years ago. In their heyday, though, they were a phenomenon, selling upwards of a hundred thousand units per title. And it's not as old hat as you might think: the same design skills I used in those days apply equally when I'm creating modern videogames.

If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact.

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

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.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

I want to write a story for people where they finish it, and it sticks with them.

As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

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.

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.

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.

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.