Weekly Links #115

Well, things certainly didn't go as planned this week. After a newsletter long enough that I had to set a link aside, then giving up on it and writing an entirely different article instead, today I have only two links for you. Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun we have an article arguing in favor of letting players enjoy a game's story, without having to run the gauntlet of RPG combat if they don't want to. Parts of it even echo Cheetah's old rant about configurable games. And I'll add, probably not for the first time either, that it's grand time for game developers to stop thinking they have to make the players earn the story, a bit a a time, by running a gauntlet repeatedly. That doesn't make your story interactive any more than making players click to advance a fixed dialogue. Learn to let the story move forward constantly, even if you lose control to a degree. That's the whole point — you're ceding some control to the player. If you don't want that, why are you even making games in the first place? Go write a novel instead. I like novels more than games these days, anyway.

In unrelated news, @ifictionfr alerts me of an old interview with Steve Meretzky of Infocom fame, recently republished. It contains some trivia I never heard before, as well as scans of the design documents for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — a surprisingly informal mish-mash of handwritten notes. Not much to say there, except to recommend it. So have fun, and see you next week.