There's the most obvious type of story; the one that people always think of when they think of a story in the traditional sense, you know, the characters and the dialogue and the progression. But there's the narrative of the explorer; which areas do you go to first and second and third- that's really going to form your impression, and the player impression is everything when it comes to a video game and story; it's the perception becomes reality. If they go to a combat area first, they're going to perceive this world as a very harsh place. If they go to a town first, where there's a lot of dialogue and trading, they're going to see it as more of a social environment. And that kind of forms their ongoing impressions. So that's the narrative of the explorer. The narrative of combat, you know, you think about a boxing match: moment to moment, second to second, every move, every jab, every duck, every foot movement- its almost like a story, a, a story in and of- uh- a story in itself. Its sort of a, a very fast-moving story, but your tactics that you choose in battles in a game are actually a type of story as well. And its really neat actually seeing a telemetry written out after a player has played a game, just seeing what they've chosen to do, tactical, moment to moment, that's a type of narrative I think. The narrative of customization/progression is another story. Its like a hero's journey- or a villain's journey depending on the kind of character you like to play- if you display that, like we're doing on say a social site, like social-dot-fire-dot-com, you can actually see, so the narrative of your hero's journey, and displayed out, and every player has a different hero's journey and its really neat to see the comparison side by side, and say, Really, you did that at that point, rather than going here, you went here and you got this new cool suit of armor and that allowed you to defeat this dragon and allowed you to move on here and talk to these guys and get a new quest and head back, its like, its really divergent and its really interesting and when you see stories exposed side-by-side, you see how unique and differentiated game stories are from the linear medium. And that's part of why its an art form as I see it, because you can touch people on an emotional level, and you'll actually have the player at the center as the actor and also simultaneously as the director, and its sometimes even the content creator if they're making user-generated content of this experience, all at the same time. It's amazing.
