There are times, rarely, where I wish that I’d been put in charge of a meeting I’m attending. It’s rare, mainly because I despise responsibility in any shape or form, but sometimes the meeting is managed in such a way that I want to commit acts of unspeakable cruelty in order (like give Uwe Boll more funding) in order to vent my frustration. As I sat through this year’s “Future of Storytelling in Games” panel discussion, I found myself desperately wishing to instruct the speakers (and the moderator in particular) the lessons from “Robert’s Rules of Order”.

The panel of speakers was comprised of Matthew Karch and Michael Hall (who both worked on Timeshift), Dennis Dyack (of Silicon Knights), Mary DeMarle (who’s written a number of game stories, including Myst 3 & 4), Matt Costello (who wrote The 7th Guest’s story) and Tim Willis (creative director of ID). At first glance, this sounded like it was going to be an excellent talk, particularly because of the representation of game developers who are on opposite sides of the “story vs. technology” debate, but a lot of the arguments ended up occurring between Karch and Dyack in ways that were more irritating than enlightening; meanwhile, moderator Deborah Todd did a poor job of keeping the discussion on track.

Things started out well enough, we were introduced to everyone and they gave their backgrounds in the gaming industry, so things sounded promising. The main topic of discussion (for a while, at least) followed the question about where writers can and should fit in during the development process. Dyack, of course, said they should be a part of the team from the getgo. He emphasized his company’s focus on storytelling and stressed that games are “the eighth artform… with the eighth art form, the glue is interactivity and gameplay. That layer is something that makes our industry very unique, however it does not stand alone.” Not only that, but he explained that Silicon Knights actually has an entire writing department which comes up with the conceptual universe which ends up tying all the different elements of the game together. Most of the panelists agreed with him, including Costello who added, “anyone who talks to young people knows the passion they bring for their stories,” and continued on stating that one doesn’t have to sacrifice storytelling for the sake of gameplay.

And this is where things took a definite turn. Karch jumped into the discussion at this point and, after admitting that storytelling hadn’t been a huge focus with Timeshift (no, really?), he also pointed out that storytelling isn’t always necessary to have a popular game… though, to give the man credit, he did go on to say that with most games having a set story process is necessary to create something of quality.

Before things completely veered off topic between Dyack and Karch regarding the pros and cons of outsourcing in game development, Costello, Willis and DeMarle made some great contributions to the discussion while Hall generally sat quietly at the table and looked a little harangued. Willis in particular came off as someone who had a good grasp on the necessary meeting point between creativity and technology in order to create a successful title. “People forget that we actually invented the shooter genre,” he quipped at one point, and then went on to state that genres in the future would hopefully fade away in general: “We should just make our games stand for what they are… you shouldn’t have to call it a shooter, an adventure game, or whatever. You should call it a great game.”

I would have liked to have listened to Costello, Willis, and Hall just chat about their general ideas regarding storytelling and where they think the field is going to progress. Unfortunately, the talk kept on getting hijacked by Karch and Dyack to squabble about their opinions regarding unrelated topics until the panel was over and I left the room with a bad taste in my mouth.