Will Wright's SXSW keynote: should games tell stories?

Game designer Will Wright's keynote at the SXSW festival seems like a doozy: Alice of the Wonderland blog took close notes. Wright skilfully tackles the role of story in games: do games tell stories? How about players? Should they tell stories? This is one of the juiciest rants on the subject of narrative and experience I've read, a good companion piece to Bruce Sterling's 1991 speech The Wonderful Power of Storytelling (I dropped out of university shortly after reading this, determined to follow its advice and "woo the muse of the odd").

Stories are about empathy, and games are about agency. I’m causing what’s going on on screen. Can I do this? Can I accomplish this? These models are cognitive technology. They’re the original educational technology. They involve abstracting the world. Both of these respond to being stuck in time, but we wanna move experiences outside time... so...

A lot of stories start out with here are all these characters [Leia, Luke]... and the structure is pretty fuzzy. A much wider set of possibilities can unfold from the beginning of the movie; think about Star Wars. Causal links. Think of that scene from Indiana Jones and all these traps are going off, you’re filling in all these possibilities yourself, what if he falls in the hole, what if , what if .. and that makes it interesting. Star Wars grips you in the realism of the backstory, the fact that the ships were dirty [tells you something]…

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