GDC Radio Presents: 'Interactive Narratives Revisited: Ten Years of Research'
In this week's edition of GDC Radio, we present a lecture from game designer and regular Gamasutra contributor Ernest Adams from the 2005 Game Developers Conference. Here, Adams revisits a lecture he gave ten years prior, at which point he came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an "Interactive Movie" (a popular phrase at the time), and that game designers should instead focus on interactive narrative. Has anything suggested otherwise in the last ten years? Adams focuses on this question, and more, in this fascinating lecture.
The following extract is from the lecture's official description:
In 1995 Ernest Adams gave a lecture at the GDC called "The Challenge of the Interactive Movie," in which he outlined some fundamental problems with interactive narrative at that time. He identified three in particular: the problem of internal consistency; the problem of narrative flow; and the problem of amnesia.
In this lecture, Adams looks back on the last 10 years and examines how both academic research and the game industry as a creative business have addressed these and other issues in the design of interactive narratives. He draws on the published literature and on his own experience as a player and a professional game designer to illuminate the progress that has been made, including numerous examples from real games.
This lecture will also be a partial summary of Mr. Adams' Ph.D. research.
The lecture brings the attendee up-to-date on the current state of the art and offers direct suggestions for further work. It includes a history of efforts to merge interactivity with narratives; a statement of the key issues faced in combining the two. It incluseds an examination of the work done over the last ten years, with comments on the degree of success of different approaches, and examples taken from published games. It also includes concrete proposals for future research, development, and experimentation.
You can now now download the 'Interactive Narratives Revisited: Ten Years of Research' GDC Radio lecture (.MP3, 15.7 MB). You can subscribe to GDCRadio.net podcasts using iTunes and searching the directory for GDC Radio or by clicking this link. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.
[Additionally, until June 30, 2006, all individual GDC radio downloads have been reduced to only $2.99. You can purchase individual sessions at GDCRadio.net.]
In this week's edition of GDC Radio, we take a trip back to 2002, with Ion Storm's then-Project Director Randy Smith discussing stealth gameplay fundamentals in the Thief series, in a talk titled 'GDC Radio: Design Fundamentals of Stealth Gameplay in the Thief Series.' The lecture provided what was then an early glimpse at the mechanics of the third entry in the series, Thief: Deadly Shadows, which premiered on store shelves over two years later. 
We are pleased to offer a special $2.99 price for all GDCRadio.net downloads for the month of June. Sales ends June 30, 2006. Click the conference name below to view the sessions available for purchase: