Interactive Narrative Quotes

We're not going to just duplicate 'Heavy Rain,' because we are passionate about innovation and discovery, so we're trying to discover new ground and see how we can move from 'Heavy Rain' and create something even more immersive.

As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I'm just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what's happening onscreen.

What's the fundamental problem that VR solves better than anything? To me it's straightforward. It's story. VR tells stories better than any medium.

My style was always to put the audience in the driving seat, so they feel they're a part of the action.

I think you have to serve a lot of masters when you're doing a video game: you're not just telling a linear story or doing something that's all action.

While films are a very visual and emotional artistic medium, video games take it one step further into the realm of a unique personal experience.

It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.

In the future, I think movies are going to be more of data sets that viewers have a hand in controlling - where the narrative originates and what happens to the content.

I'd love to take a stab at writing videogames. There are a lot of storytelling opportunities that really aren't being taken advantage of in that field. I'd like to experiment with telling a truly non-linear story.

I conceived the original 'Deus Ex' and was the project director on the game.

I think video games are going to completely take over storytelling in our society. Video games are not a fad.

'Skeleton Creek' is like nothing you've ever read before because it's a book and a movie at the same time.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, 'Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?' But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

I'm interested in making something that moves quickly, that hopefully is compelling minute-by-minute but really packed densely with exploration. I'm very interested in how re-visitable we can make films. If we can get them closer to a music album, then it's not such an arduous process to revisit, and exploration can be a bit more cryptic.

I want to go to someone's world. I'll buy it if the world is full of zombies - I'll live there if you give me a strong enough vision of what that world looks like.

The thing that I get most excited about is that it does feel like a new realm of storytelling is being created before everybody's eyes. You can do something that's not exactly a movie and not exactly a TV show, something in between.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others. The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.) Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there's a multitude of different endings.

If you played 'Heavy Rain,' there are very few cutscenes and very few moments where you don't have control.

When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to connect to people in a particular way … The way in which you guys have inhabited this world, this universe, has made you part of it, part of the story. You are living in Firefly. When I see you guys, I don’t think the show is off the air. I don’t think there’s a show; I think that’s what the world is like. … The story is our lives.

I think just the film aspect of the game has really helped me grow as a player.

I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.

The great thing about games is that it's tremendously collaborative, and it opens you up to this other world of thinking and storytelling and how you construct those stories.

A game like 'Myst' may be a gorgeous slide show that preserves its beauty at the expense of speed. A game like 'Doom' sacrifices almost everything for action. But the eye soon adjusts: the degree of detail more than adequately conveys infinite claustrophobic labyrinths populated by howling monsters.