This is an interesting comparison.

It sort of comes down to the social experience versus the personal experience and open world games versus games with more linear progression. I believe, as you point out, that both are likely to exist as games evolve.

Both approaches offer interesting and unique gameplay ideas and experiences, so it should not be a matter of choosing one over the other. Advancing both so they can learn from the techniques of each other seems like the smarter path.

Great article.

Spector seems to have a false dichotomy. Why can't a game be multiplayer and guided by a designer's vision? Gears of War seemed to do it just fine; the player goes through the game exactly as CliffyB wanted, and having a second player to take up the other character didn't change anything in the story. A game developer always, by the nature of the medium, has 100% control over the player (unless they hack the game). The player can "make choices," but those choices are only the ones which the code and design have made available. The player can't go anywhere or do anything that the game isn't set up to permit, and this is equally true in single- or multiplayer. I have deep respect for Spector's ability and work, but sometimes I think he loses sight of important things when he makes these kinds of statements.

I do disagree with Spector, but I can see his point for sure.

Luckily, the industry has grown to a point where different philosophies can co-exist. Different types of gamers require different types of experiences, and some, like myself, can enjoy different designer's visions. I like generating my own content like in LBP, I like mmo's, I like deathmatch FPS with my friends, and I also like a single player experience that is the sole vision of the designer. User generated content and multiplayer games are becoming more and more popular, so I can see where some designers may see that as (a better word for threat?), but there is a clear need for many design philosophies to co-exist.

Good, thought-provoking (and not insulting :) opinion piece.

What it seems to come down to is the question, "Who is the storyteller?"

To exaggerate the case somewhat, a developer who thinks it's the game creator's responsibility to tell a good story is likely to insist that every moment in the gameworld, every possible aspect of the play experience, must be controlled as tightly as possible. I've played games like that. I didn't much care for them; I like for my choices to have some narrative consequences.

Meanwhile, a developer who thinks that people should be as free as possible to tell their own stories is likely to be equally certain that players should be given storytelling tools and then turned loose. Taken to its extreme, this leads to virtual worlds like Second Life, which is so far from an author-directed experience that it's not even a game. The Sims would be a slightly less extreme example.

I believe Warren Spector enjoys much of his positive (and IMO well-deserved) reputation since the days of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss because the games he produces tend to occupy a smart middle ground between these two extremes. There's a definite story being told in his games, but players are -- by design -- able to approach that story through any of a number of supported playstyles. At a high level, these games are linear; but at any moment of play there's considerable freedom to take different paths in solving story-related problems -- even more so than in, say, Valve's highly-regarded Half-Life games in which the player-character is sometimes literally "on rails."

So why haven't the Spector-type games been more successful commercially? I don't say that as a criticism; I happen to enjoy those games more than any other. But I think it's a valid question from a business-oriented game design perspective. Is something distinctive lost when both designer and player have equal billing as "the storyteller" of a game?

I love games in general, but have grown to prefer multiplayer over singleplayer components for one reason - AI. What good is all of that design work when the AI can't sell the narrative? A lot of us, myself included, are able to look past these flaws in a game but I'm offended that Spector called multiplayer game design lazy, it really shows a little ignorance on his part. World of Warcraft is stomping on the competition in a lot of ways and Game Design is still one of there biggest strengths (both multiplayer and singleplayer).

"Say what you will about the BioShock "choice," for example, but we're all learning from the differences in one another's experiences of the same event."

I have only slight familiarity with BioShock, but from what I gather from friends, you can progress through that game following a variety of very different paths. Even then, you are running on rails laid by the game designer. In this case, you have a multi-threaded set of rails, but a set of rails, nontheless.

A better example of user created authorship would probably be Ultima Online. In UO, there were no quests to speak of. There were dungeons to explore, and critters to kill above ground, but these were mostly for resource gathering, not story telling. Origin supplied the stage, and players supplied the stories, and there were as many stories as there were players. Some stories were obscure, and some stories spanned an entire shard, and some became know across other shards.

I have personal experience with a player war between two guilds that involved not only our two guilds on UO Siege Perilous, but featured a web of alliances that formed and broke, included betrayals, heroism, double crosses, victories and defeats for both sides as the shifting fortunes of the war ebbed and flowed. Hundreds of players were involved in this war, either directly or indirectly, and it spilled out of the game and into the UO forums, and various respective guild forums. It lasted for a couple of years. None of it was developed, coordinated, or even acknowleged by Origin, and yet it remains my most significant gaming experience of the last decade.

I can see where Warren Spector may not like the idea of user generated content, but in both Ultima Online and in the late lamented Shadowbane, the stories generated by the players themselves were far superior to any of the thin homogonized, sanitized, repetative gruel supplied by most game developers.

I'm sure developers like Spector have tales they want to tell. Based on recent game failures, many players are not interested in what they have to offer.

Give us a compelling world, and then get out of our way. More often than not, at least in the MMO world, you are an obstacle, not a resource.

I believe this is a temporary problem of a medium that hasn't developed its proper language yet. Obviously Lantz's types of games will continue to exist as they always have, long before computers. They are the traditional play experiences and many videogame designers would do well to move back closer to them.

But Spector has discovered a new medium. A medium for storytelling that did not exist before. It is only a historic coincidence that this medium came out of games.

This new medium's interactivity introduces an entirely new range of possibilities for storytelling. Authors will develop ways of including the player in the telling without having to give up their role. Such active involvement of the public has in fact been a dream of many artists for many centuries. We have finally developed a technology that is capable of realizing this dream. But it will take some time to understand how to do this well.