In some sense you will come upon a paradox if you get too fixated on the idea of securing authorial control and encoding it immutably into the mechanics of your game. You get too greedy with control and pretty soon your players have nothing to do; it ceases to be a game.

Admittedly Sleep Is Death goes pretty far toward the “abdication of authorship” approach of game storytelling, like The Sims, but at the same time once you start playing it you will start to see ways in which this authorship could be regained, while still allowing the player considerable freedom within it. It’s a shift in worldview. From the old place it looks like a dead end, but once you step over you will start to see that this is just the beginning.

For example, when I play I feel like an Actor. I am Playing a Role. This is fundamentally different than how I feel when I play a typical game, even one with a good story. And it is one of many aspects of Sleep Is Death that offer a new model for understanding authorship and story and freedom and choice in games, with many more possibilities than we had previously thought possible.

Cool?

But it is an intriguing experiment. I’m yet to play it.

I just started playing it with a storyteller-ish friend, and my mind is starting to open up in all sorts of interesting ways.

Check the gallery at SIDTube to see some example stories. I’ve already posted one as a player under my name, “axcho”.

I’m curious to hear what you think of it.

A simple example would be the difficulty of pulling off an in medias res without confusing the hell out of the player or bathing him in exposition and tutorials. Is it impossible to do well? I don’t think so, but it’s probably more difficult than in other media.

However, we shouldn’t discard the thousands of years of knowledge in linear storytelling. Of course linear dramaturgy plays an important role in games as well. Just because something happens to ME doesn’t mean that I will be automatically engaged by it.

As for you comment – I wouldn’t reduce the discussion down to Ebert. The reason for re-creating existing narrative structures in games is not only to be able to recognize their artistic value. There is a much more pragmatic reason. We have already so much knowledge on how to construct and de-construct narratives in linear media. We need to find a way to transfer at least part of that knowledge onto non-linear media. Otherwise, we would need to re-invent the wheel. That would be quite a disadvantage for video-games as a cultural medium.

Now, if one constructs the game so that there’s plenty of opportunity for player-driven drama, then we can start talking. Though I see that you probably think something similar to this, given the solutions you proposed.