He hasn't played the Mass Effect series yet.

That is all.

Mass effect has incredible story telling, but it certainly is not the best at that. It's the complete package that makes mass effect so good.

That being said, this blog, and your post took his comments out of perspective. He's talking about contextual interactive responses to progressing the story. He is not talking about the story in general. 

And he is absolutely right. Waggling around to progress a story is going to take me out of the experience because of a number of things ranging from force feedback and the fact that that the remainder of the game is played conventionally (or unconventionally in the case of the wii). 

Story telling has nothing to do with how you interact with the game. A good story is a stand alone entity. It can exist by itself without the medium surrounding it. If it can not, then it fails as a story. Mass effect could very well be a novel and its story would be just as good.

Jaffe is a very experienced game designer. He is a master of pure mechanics and has made a wide variety of games from very different genres. has anyone else here played Mickey Mania? that game was spectacular. 

That being said, jaffe has experienced presenting a story in a number of different ways. He certainly has the right to speak about story in game design and I think people are really missing his true message.

Jaffe is not trying to tell you that story has not been properly cracked, what he's saying is that until this day there has not been a game where the contextual input from the user affects the story and is believable to the point where it actually adds anything to the story.  

Motion controls are really what he is speaking of here, and while they may offer truck loads of game play intuitiveness, they are not an excuse for poor mechanics, and they certainly will not make poor mechanics better. 

Just in that same light, motion controls will not make you feel "in" the story. You cannot feel. Natal can not replace the feeling of slapping someone, it will feel unnatural. There's no force response. You're just wagging your hand. 

Natal and the motion controllers are fantastic for providing enhancements to solid mechanics. Super Mario Galaxy being the diamond studded crown of this notion. They will not provide enhancements to solid story telling.

What improves story telling? visuals, music, voice acting, character design, environmental design, mood, setting and a number of other emotional aspects of game design.

Jaffe's primary concern, for those that actually listened to him is that he is concerned that the motion control will be played as a key part to improving a story rather than simply spending development costs on those other direct relationships.

He means that until these alternative control schemes are able to actually put you in the game that they will only take away from the other parts of game design.

It is a very valid concern. 

Hm, I agree and disagree with him at the same time. I'm confused.

I'm a pure play mechanics type of nerd. I'm so pure play that I'm actually a fan of just abstract shapes in space (I love Tetris pretty much more than any narrative/cinematic games). Also, I love storytelling in every medium but gaming because "it hasn't been cracked yet." But... I firmly believe that the most important thing to happen to gaming is motion controls and not interactive storytelling.

Once you interact with a story, you ruin it. A good story has a good ending. Any interaction whatsoever should CHANGE the ending. But games with multiple endings have 2 or 5 or 10 and turn into "good ending vs. bad ending" or "each fighter in the tournament gets their own ending" or "choose your own adventure but every ending is boring." Games with only 1 ending are usually the most interesting because that one ending is what they spent all their time on... but then it feels like the choices you made during the game don't actually matter because they only affected meaningless sidequests and not the real meat of the story. Until a brilliant writer/designer comes along and fixes that problem... I'll stick with Tetris.



TL;DR

They call it gameplay not storyplay.
I like where Jaffe's going with this, but to me story breaks down whether I'm swinging an arm or pressing a button.

Motion controls and interactive storytelling are two peaks of game design. they are both equally important. 

Both of them have a long way to go. No platform has motion control that is true to the concept yet, just like no story telling has been perfected yet.

Does not compute. What's that supposed to mean?

Can someone please rush him a copy of Bioshock

can you please read my first post? You guys are all misunderstanding him.. 

He's right - if he means in context to other mediums.

Sorry guys, but ME has good storytelling for a videogame but pretty weak storytelling in context to other mediums.

So he's right I'd say. But this is known. Vidoegams in terms of narrative are where films where years ago not long after the medium got past the sheer fun of the technology and ducking when someone seemed to shot a gun at the camera.

Although he normally annoys me, I think he's also spot on with the issue of keeping the gamer in context to the narrative and not thinking mechanically.

In ME1, for example, within moments it was obvious to me as a longtime gamer that there was a very simple 'good/bad' mechanic and each time I'd evaluate it from a game mechanic point of view - do I slap this guy because I want more renegade points or try and calm him down because I want to be a paragon.

Funnily enough, Silent Hill 2 I'd argue had the best approach, where you never even knew you had a choice as everything was kept hidden from the player. That's the better approach I think. Remove visibility to the mechanics. Simply offer the choices blind like real life.

If I had a choice in real life, I would be playing video games right now.