its really easy when you're developing your form, your medium, to fall back on patterns: things you know that are reliable, that work. Myth, certainly: heroic figures, journey, all that sort of stuff. But I think you're seeing now people hitting the limitations of those patterns, because there's this whole world now opening up to us which is social interaction: games that are persistent, where your character changes over time- and the old patterns don't necessarily fit as well as they used to. You know, linear narrative isn't necessarily as powerful as it used to be. And I think its taken us time to realize that. The most important, powerful stories are the ones that you share with your buddy about something you did that maybe a designer scripted a certain way to make it, that thing more likely, but maybe you just screwed their scripting and did something that was totally unanticipated by the designer, and the world supported it. And the story that you and your friend can tell about that night two weeks ago when you went there, and did that thing, and got that stuff- that's going to be so much better than any story I could dream up and attempt to type according to some pattern. So, as a storyteller that's gone through more than ten years of hardcore, linear pushes, I'm really excited about the way that I think all of us are now opening up and using these new tools that we have, and only really relying on the old ones when, you know, when they make sense. But not just as a pattern to follow blindly, because I think we've done that for too long.
