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Josiah Lebowitz

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Interactive Storytelling for Video Games: A Player-Centered Approach to Creating Memorable Characters and Stories 1st Edition

by Josiah Lebowitz (Author), Chris Klug (Author)

4.3 28 ratings

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What really makes a video game story interactive?
What's the best way to create an interactive story?
How much control should players be given?
Do they really want that control in the first place?
Do they even know what they want-or are their stated desires at odds with the unconscious preferences?

All of these questions and more are examined in this definitive book on interactive storytelling for video games. You'll get detailed descriptions of all major types of interactive stories, case studies of popular games (including Bioshock, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, and Metal Gear Solid), and how players interact with them, and an in-depth analysis of the results of a national survey on player storytelling preferences in games. You'll get the expert advice you need to generate compelling and original game concepts and narratives.With Interactive Storytelling for Video Games, you'll:

ISBN-10

0240817176
ISBN-13

978-0240817170
Edition

1st
Publisher

Routledge
Publication date

March 1, 2011
Language

English
Dimensions

7.5 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
Print length

332 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Lebowitz and Klug's tag-team approach to the subject makes this an engaging read, even for seasoned interactive storytellers. The combination of Lebowitz's theory and Klug's field experience present both new and experienced game writers with both the promises, and the challenges, of experimenting with game narratives. The use of diverse case studies, which cover everything from the classic Final Fantasy VII to the Japanese visual novel genre, provide readers with the opportunity to engage Lebowitz and Klug's ideas and inspire innovation in their own writing. The exercises and questions both guide readers through the key points, and encourage application and exploration, perfect for a classroom setting.
-Kathleen Dunley, Faculty Chair-English, Rio Salado College

Interactive Storytelling in Games is a great primer for students, educators, and writers looking to move into this increasingly prominent profession. The authors explain branching dialogue clearly and carefully, covering many details that are ordinarily lost on writers of other types of fiction, as well as the designers of many games! This book will help you understand what makes games tick, how to tell stories using them, and what players really want out of their games and stories. It's thought-provoking, intelligent, and founded on a combination of experience and research that's hard to match.-Chris Keeling, Course Director, Game Design, Full Sail University; Executive Committee Member, IGDA Game Writing SIG

Lebowitz and Klug's tag-team approach to the subject makes this an engaging read, even for seasoned interactive storytellers. The combination of Lebowitz's theory and Klug's field experience present both new and experienced game writers with both the promises, and the challnges, of experimenting with game narratives. The use of diverse case studies, which cover everything from the classic Final Fantasy VII to the Japanese visual novel genre, provide readers with the opportunity to engage Lebowitz and Klug's ideas and inspire innovation in their own writing. The exercises and questions both guide readers through the key points, and encourage application and exploration, perfect for a classroom setting.
-Kathleen Dunley, Faculty Chair-English, Rio Salado College

About the Author

Josiah Lebowitz

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (March 1, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 332 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0240817176
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0240817170
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.37 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #267,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #72 in Computer & Video Game Design
- #150 in Game Programming
- #282 in Video Game Art (Books)

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4.3 28 ratings

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Josiah Lebowitz

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Josiah Lebowitz is a writer and independent game designer. He wrote his first novel at the age of thirteen and hasn’t stopped since. An avid fan of fantasy novels, Japanese anime and manga, and a wide variety of video games, he loves nothing better than a good story. Having lived and worked in many places in the US and abroad, he currently teaches game design and writing at George Mason University while creating new books and games.

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1wngdngl

Great discussion on game stories

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

Many in-depth breakdowns of both good and bad storytelling examples, and a fair view of the potential of many types of interactivity.

Helpful

not quite perfect, but it does give you a leg up on game story.

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2013

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

One of the things I liked about this book is it tended to cover the strength and weakness of the dichotomy of various game story types. Whether character or story driven, open ended or closed ended, optional or fixed, there is a way for most every game and sometimes only one kind will fit well. In today's massively multi-player games peoples experiences are about how they starred in or helped out in their quest. It may have been a loner thing, or a part of a small or larger group, the that is the adventure. The story is really the setting and the intermediate goals, kill the monster, get the treasure, interact with the group, the npc's etc. In a game like this you can have many close ended quests within an open ended story. The story is about you and your character at least from your perspective. If the quests are boring, too easy, too difficult, too lame a story behind it you will not want to play.

Aside from the MMO's there are many other types of games. Strategy games like star craft, have a story that drives the missions in the single player mode. SC2 for instance, had a fairly fixed storyline and goal, but at least a few options to get from point A to point B. It capitalized on the characters of the original, and took it to a higher level. This I thought, enables them to release the game one expansion at a time as a trilogy. Had the story been minimal, they should have released the "missions" all at once. They way they did it creates value and incentive for doing a good part 2 and part 3 of the game. This book is about interactive storytelling, and although as I said here SC2 does not use that as much. Where it's used are optional missions they can be played for different goals (although there is only a few). The other element is the tech that is developed, you can only choose one choice going up the tech tree, and once chosen for that game, it cannot be changed, typically this is a choice between attack or defensive strength. You can go all attack, all defense or a combination of the two.

I'm not an MMO player, I don't play a lot of games with player driven stories. I prefer the strategic or the flat out shoot-em-up types. Still I like to have a reason to keep interested, and I like surprises which story's can foster. Even the cheapie games of old it was nice to know something about the quest. One interesting game called Swords and Serpents for Intellivison had a deadly trap for playing as a single fighter. The goal was to kill the dragon in the lowest level, but you read scrolls along the way to find out things and gain powers. For some reason I remember there was a scroll that what it should have done didn't make sense so it should have been bypassed. However, curiosity can kill more than the cat, so you had to read the scroll. It read: "to read this scroll is a fools folly" and it immediately transported you to a small room with four walls and no door. If you had a magic user and a fireball you could escape, but as a fighter it was game over, and you were nearly at the end of the quest. A nice side track to a mostly linear story.

This book explores all the different types of stories that may drive a game, from multiple ending stories to, player driven stories, to traditional stories, branching path, to simple linear stories. It also describes a lot of games and what type of story was chosen for each. This should help if you are deciding what to do. Remember even a very simple story can drive a good game. Take angry birds, the storyline is they were mad about the pigs hogging something, I don't know what, but they have to destroy various structures to do in the pigs. Story, kind of crazy stupid, but without it, this is similar to games like rampart or other shoot-em-up puzzle games. Add the birds and piggies, and it's a run-a-way hit. What the book lacks is how the story should be told or developed, it's not much help there. The make something coherent, consider getting a book on the "Heroes Journey in literature", its what script fixers in Hollywood use to patch up bad stories for movies and TV. It should work for videogames as well.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

yes, you can be the puppet master

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2011

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

This does not feel like a computer book. Focal Press has put out many books on video gaming and on film production, and if you are reading this, you might have a background in programming video games. But the book doesn't have a line of code. Instead it is a testament to the evolution and current sophistication of this field. From the start, it focuses on the story telling. Not unlike a traditional book on writing screenplays. We have moved away from the low level details of how to draw and animate a character. Books on those were primarily about the graphics; because that was what you mostly had to master.

What you can do with this book is read it as a good summary of the different popular video games of 2010-11. The authors do a comparative analysis at the plot level. Accompanied by extensive explanations of how to classify games.

But you can see important differences with writing screenplays. In some video games, you can have multiple endings, that depend on how the player does. And of course, a game is an interactive process. Quite unlike watching a play or film. This ability to branch a story into several lines, and perhaps have some merge if the player does certain tasks, can be a fascinating challenge to storyboard and master. The book is quite candid about the potential weaknesses of the approach. Which is one of its strengths. It offers a clear eyed study of the potential and pitfalls of current gaming.

Still, if you are able to follow its advice, you can carve out an intricate mesh of a story to entrance your players.

Yes, you can be the puppet master!

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jessica Weissman

Useful and intelligent resource

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2011

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

People love stories, and have loved them for as long as we have records - Homer told stories, the Bible is full of them, and other cultures have them too. As the technical resources available for videogames evolve, there are more resources to devote to new forms of storytelling. Players can now participate in stories in new ways rather than just being funneled down one narrative track after they solve a series of interesting story-based puzzles.

This book analyzes and presents the types of storytelling exemplified in modern videogames in an ordered list of categories that reflects how much control is given to the players, with plenty of examples. The issues taken up by the two authors as they comment on each others' words range from how much player-centric storytelling dilutes the authorial hand to some of the practicalities of creating lots of scenes and interactions that few players will see. It seems that not many people go back and play a game again in order to see the other pathways. Maybe that correlates to some factor in these modern games, as I remember playing some of the original Infocom text adventures repeatedly to see what fun stuff I missed and to explore the worlds they set up.

It's taken for granted these days tbat totally player-driven narrative is best, and that's what seems to interest the best and most creative developers. To their credit, the authors spend almost as much time talking about the disadvantages of this form as they do about the advantages. They also present research comparing what players say they want to what they actually buy and play through.

Everyone is familiar with totally player-driven stories - that describes both cowboys-and-indians-in-the-back-yard and Dungeons and Dragons perfectly. Which points up the chief technical limitation of completely player-driven games: they require at least one human directing things so that the game can respond to any possible situation. No finite computer game, and certainly no game created for profit can match this state. Even the Sims, which the authors right call a toy rather than a game, meets this criterion. World of Warcraft may come closer than anything else, but even there the developers tell players that the best way to enjoy it is to go through a few quests as planned out, and THEN start exploring.

What people seem to like best is other people, whether it is social media or backyard games or WoW. Player-driven stories usually come closer than others to providing people. What people like second-best is a good story, and that takes some degree of authorial control. Totally player-driven games haven't yet matched the emotional impact of certain games the authors describe in this book.

So should you buy this book? Yes, if you're interested in a thorough non-academic consideration of story in games, with a lot of examples. There are insights here. But if you haven't read some of the classics of the field, such as Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, start there. Nobody has proven Crawford wrong yet, though they have added a lot of practical knowledge.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

Good book

Martin Jackson

Interactive Stories for Video Games

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2011

Verified Purchase

I bought this book to give me ideas on ways of developing my interactive stories and out of the whole book, there was one good idea, to draw flowcharts for the branches from decision points, to help plan the interactive side of the story. I found the book useful.

I also was fascinated on how other people write interactive stories, so the book was informative. I haven't read it all, from cover to cover, but I will.

2 people found this helpful

Tamara

Very informative book

Reviewed in Germany on March 28, 2019

Verified Purchase

Used it for a paper that i'm working on! Had a lot of helpful information on how to build a story for games specifically and a lot of good examples and case studies that clarify certain points!

Jak Daves

Bad. And here's why...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2017

Verified Purchase

I can’t stand this book. It’s a glossy contradiction. While it covers a broad range of topics, from authored to emergent storytelling, it lacks tangible insight. It contains dozens of case studies but wastes its time on description rather than analysis. In short, it’s full of words but devoid of content. I went in excited, and came out angry and bereft. If I was writing this book, I’d stop there with my criticism and move swiftly on to another topic. But I’m not this book, so let’s examine these complaints in detail.

The overall structure is fine. It begins with discussion of writer-driven (‘fully traditional’) stories and progresses through to ‘fully player-driven stories,’ which seems logical and comprehensive on the surface, before you realize the pros and cons for the different approaches constantly boil down to the same basic fact: the former is more structured because the author has greater control. This same point is repeated and reformed in every chapter. Branches create content. Content needs to be written. But branches create choice. Players love choice. On and on, covering only the highest level points, without any mention of how drama or character development – the fundamentals of narrative – fits into this equation. One particularly egregious section is titled, ‘Making the player cry,’ which presents a bizarre assertion (“If you ask people why game stories aren’t as good as those in books or film, you’ll probably hear the response, ‘Because they don’t make you cry.’ But is this really a valid criticism?”) followed by the complaint that this fictitious strawman needs to “play more games.” Even the case studies shy away from the nuts and bolts of the craft, opting to avoid ‘spoilers’ than actually discuss why a specific gaming moments are so effective: “It all leads up to a brilliant final level that really can’t be done justice buy a few lines of text and must be experienced first-hand.” Thanks, but I’ve played Braid, and I came here expecting some kind of intelligent insight, not a coquettish recommendation.

The book also contains an alarmingly rudimentary understanding of story structure itself, no more evident than in its treatment of Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. Josiah’s interpretation wilfully omits an entire stage (the Resurrection), removing the defining moment of character development, and resulting in a protracted two-act structure that contradicts the intent of its own source material. Josiah simply doesn’t understand this stuff (specifically ‘the return’ aspect of the ‘voyage and return’) and by creating his own “breakdown of the stages” has created the blueprint of every half-baked, under-developed video game story going – specifically one that confuses the Act 2 turning point for the story’s climax.

And all this is to say nothing of the actual writing style, which is meandering and wordy.

Above all, it smacks of an author that has spent a long time examining and studying games, but very little time actually developing them. His enthusiasm for the topic is undeniable, but his grasp of the practicalities of writing for the medium is lacking. On the plus side, it’s co-authored by Chris Klug who drops in every other page with some genuinely insightful critique. If the entire book was comprised of only these sections, I’d probably be more charitable. As it is, don’t waste your time and money. If you want to learn how to write effective narrative, first read Story by Robert McKee, then check Slay the Dragon by Bryant for video games specifically.

If you know literally nothing about the difference between an authored and a player-driven story - and have the time and money to burn - then bolt on another two stars and fill your boots. Otherwise avoid.

2 people found this helpful

James Avery

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

Great read

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