Non-Linear Narratives Quotes

I don't know how video game narrative works.

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

Games already pretty much have reached the point of photo-realism. Working on more intense graphics is not the only path we can take anymore. Simply relying on the sheer horsepower of the machine will not bring the industry a bright future.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

I actually went to film school and was making experimental films for a short time, so it wasn't such a leap.

It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.

My interest in Virtual Reality (VR) films began for me when I began a fellowship with MIT's Open Documentary Lab. It was a profound experience to be on MIT's campus one day a week and to enter a new world of storytelling where breaking convention and traditional methods were expected. This was deeply challenging and inspiring.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.

Film is limitless, but some stage presentations on film can look too theatrical.

When I was going to film school, before film school, my hero was David Lynch.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'

Tarantino's stuff in its inception was all about finding a way for him to break into Hollywood.

I think the most interesting things happening in VR are going to be somewhere in between what you call a traditional game and what you call a traditional movie.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

There are all kinds of things evolving in filmmaking I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. A friend of mine just showed me an immersive 360 movie where you move from environment to environment and can look in any direction you want while you're experiencing it. Which is cool - but it kills directing, as far as I'm concerned.

It's strange, but something about lack of structure needs a structure itself. Otherwise, after a while, it's like looking at a Rothko painting or a Peter Greenaway film. You think, 'OK, I want to see something else now.'

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

The vocabulary of film is camera cuts, it's how they communicate. But games are different. We don't really need to do that. We do it because it's a language that we're familiar with.

A lot of the surreal filmmakers, like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or countless other underground filmmakers... Their sense of explosive images have always dominated their films. It's a way to shock the senses, to make them open themselves.