Karen Traviss Quotes

You can't just come up with an idea for a game and stick the drama on top. It all has to be one driving thrust.

I'm definitely more of a 'think game' kind of girl. I'll read every single dialogue and codex entry and lore entry. I really do love projecting myself and creating my character.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

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.

The technology for radiant stories in 'Skyrim' is phenomenal. We tried and pared it back.

With a movie, it's probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration. But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player.

My goal is to make a player think, 'I want to reenter this world of lies tomorrow.'

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.

Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

'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.

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

I think 'Overlord' has definitely benefited because I work with every single level designer, and working where we have space to tell the story. That's what it's all about - getting writers and storytellers involved in the team and being a back and forth process.

I still like to play games that have a beginning, an end and a story.

Story may not be a great addition to some games - games where action is the whole reason for the game to exist.

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

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

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

I don't care about the length of anything I play, as long as it's a good character.

I think world creation and monster creation and all of that stuff is exciting as a secondary element of storytelling. When it becomes more important than storytelling, I get very nervous, and you sort of lose me a little bit.

I don't want to work on any games that don't have some kind of story component because that is the draw for me.

You don't really want to talk about 'Duke' in terms of, how many levels are there, how many guns does it have, how many monsters… It's got everything it needs in terms of that, but it's always been about the experience.

The best games came from great characters.

I don't differentiate game design and script; it is one and only document. I think that one of the biggest problem with storytelling in games is that people tend to separate story and interactivity. Both should be conceived as one entity, each using the other.

You can only truly wow a player the first time he sees [a cutscene]. I felt if players saw the cutscenes outside of the game, they would no longer serve as rewards for playing the game, so I've decided against having them.

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.