I have a thing for procedurally generated content, which seems a bit odd as a designer. I don't want to sit there and nut out how every little detail of something work (although I can do that, and am pretty good at it), but I love the idea of giving the rules for how something should work.
I was having a conversation today about the Sims, and how that element of player driven narrative (which is done almost done at an abstract level) has not been carried through into other game genres.
I really need to sit down and have a good look at Dwarf Fortress soon and have a look at what that does with its unfolding story, as it sounds like the kind of thing that I am very interested in.
There's a great quote on the Gamasutra site with DF's programmer Tarn Adams about game story.
"It was partially inspired by our repeated experiences with plots in video games. We never really wanted to write a plot, and a lot of them seemed like they could be generated by a computer. So we thought about breaking stories down into core elements, and working with those instead. You'd be very hard-pressed to capture really beautiful symbolism or an advanced writing device like that with a random generator, but there are very few game stories where that would be an issue."
Exactly!
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