The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.
Anyway, to point:
Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and …

I am a late comer to the Mass Effect franchise, and I wish I had found it sooner. The first game is almost three years old now, released in November of 2007, and its sequel was just released this last January, 2010. I kept hearing about it, but just never thought about it until I found a cheap, used copy of Mass Effect and tried it out.
I was hooked.
Mass Effect, and its vastly superior successor Mass Effect 2, has set a new level for video game storytelling in my mind. …

I’ve had an idea for a long time: develop a video game conversation engine for Role Playing Games (in the style of Mass Effect or the Elder Scrolls series) that gave Non Player Characters (NPCs) a method to develop their conversational content on the fly, based on a knowledge database, syntax and keywords.
I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out the ins and outs of the idea, to offer a conversation engine design that would be easy to implement and provide players with a more immersive experience. …