Fallout 3 to have over 200 different endings (also, pet dogs :-))!

[Bodhesatva]

Here's a very simple example to illucidate the point I'm making: if your character starts out as a good guy, then later suddenly shifts and becomes a bad guy, that alone isn't "story telling" in the sense we traditionally mean that phrase. That's just... a person making choices at his or her own discretion. It's like the WWE or something. A story requires a coherent sequence of events that fit together logically.

If you had a game with 100000 different beginnings/endings, and you chose to start as a squirrel who later becomes a super intelligent human with magic powers and then loses those magic powers and then becomes a robot, okay, that's up to you. And... in a sense, I suppose you can call that a "story." But does it have logical coherency? No. Does it contain sophisticated theme or meaning that we ascribe to the highest pieces of literature and film? Again, no. It's just... the choices you decided to make with your character. Even if I did put together a coherent story, that would be my decision -- not the developers. Which again, makes it story making, not story telling.

That's the ultimate consequence of games becoming more and more flexible, with more and more user-based decision making and less linearity. Just to emphasize again: I think this is a very good thing, and I'm very glad to see games heading into this direction. So if this comes off as criticism, it's not. Instead, I'm trying to point out, again, that this moves us diametrically away from storytelling in games.