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On Video Games and Storytelling

Castelnou, France. Photo by Scarlett Messenger
Castelnou, France. Photo by Scarlett Messenger

On Video Games and Storytelling: An Interview with Tom Bissell

What were the first games? Space Invaders, Pac-Man. These were goal-oriented activities that had a vague overlay of story. So now we fast-forward thirty years, and games are primarily story-like experiences organized around the successful achievement of goals. And so the balance has flipped. The storytelling game and the purer, more traditional type of video game are, I think, on a path of divergence right now: whatever is happening in video games is going to split these two kinds of games off from each other, and so storytelling games are, eventually, going to become their own thing.