Graham Nelson Quotes

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

If I have my way, I want to go start making really interactive television. Stuff where you can sit and watch real actors do a real series and they can get into some kind of gun battle and all of a sudden your television prompts you to pick up your controller and all of a sudden, you're playing a first-person shooter.

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

I'm interested in ways that digital interfaces can be utilized as powerful narrative devices, and to engage people in new and exciting ways.

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.

'Skeleton Creek' is like nothing you've ever read before because it's a book and a movie at the same time.

In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.

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

All these experiments I've done over the years with technology have been asking whether I can tell stories that affect humans in a deeper way than I could without the technology.

My first book, 'To Be or Not To Be,' took 'Hamlet' and converted it to the choose-your-own-path format. It was a great fit for a book where you control what happens - a book as game - because the plot of 'Hamlet' is very game-like: get a mission from a ghost to kill the final boss, kill the final boss, and game over. You win.

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

Procedurals are interesting to watch, but they're not as interesting to play because there isn't an opportunity to delve into any backstories. You're instead supporting the story week by week.

I think the most interesting things happening in VR are going to be somewhere in between what you call a traditional game and what you call a traditional movie.

You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.

Gaming is going into storytelling. It was a new audience.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

I often say to my students in workshops that if they are trying to find literary inspiration, they should not go and read novels, because novels are more appropriate for series. Where as they should read short stories - that's the right format for you to be able to actually display the narrative in a film.

I think that the best television now is giving you a three-act experience.

Books are almost always better than the movies made from them, because there are things books do well and things movies do well, but usually those things don't overlap: the same with comics and animation.

The difference between film and TV, for me, is just that huge thing of knowing that there's a script that is not going to change and you can go really deep into that. With TV, you're just constantly on a high-wire, making sure you don't fall.

We want playing our games to entertain people on many different levels. Deeper down, I want to make a connection with the player, and it's the way, to me, of saying to the person playing the game that they're not alone in the world.

SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine.

. . . All these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.