Storytelling

The artform we acknowledge as being best at getting inside the heads of characters and saying something meaningful about life is the novel, largely because if its ability to portray interior monolog. Film is a distant second best, since it portrays the outward appearance of things, and is far less able to portray a character's interior life.

Games don't normally ever qualify, since they are best at showing process and action. But what if you did a game that was fundamentally about the interior lives of characters?

Tales of the Arabian Nights, originally published by West End Games in 1985, has recently been published in a new edition by Z-Man Games. It is, in its own way, an important game.

I Wish I Were the Moon is another experiment in ludic Flash storytelling from Dan Benmergui, creator of Storyteller.

UI is simple; click on the scene to 'take a picture' of an element, then move it somewhere else and click again to place it. There are five potential endings, and to the degree that there is gameplay, it's a puzzle of a sort, working to uncover all five. It's also rather sweet, in a vaguely romantic sort of way. Not a deep game, but certainly an original one.

Interactive Storytelling is a tough nut to crack, so the rule there is keep your experiments to rapid prototypes. Some have spent years building monolithic engines, complete with editor and web-service, before providing playable demonstrations of a particular algorithm, and god bless them. Den Benmergui has done with his Storyteller experiment.