The future of storytelling with Ken Levine

gamesindustry.biz:

Ken Levine has spent much of his career trying to redefine video game narratives. Most famously with the iconic twists in his acclaimed BioShock series, and most recently with the ongoing development of Judas – the debut title from Ghost Story Games.

While some may argue that video games as a medium may be reaching their limit in terms of graphics and production quality, the potential for interactive storytelling remains largely untapped. Judas attempts to explore this by mixing up the story's events depending on the relationship players develop with key characters, but Levine is keen to emphasise this is just one possible future of narratives in video games.

We spoke with the renowned designer about the biggest challenges in telling stories that react to players, the balance between author vision and player agency, the potential for generative AI in storytelling, and more.

The interview below has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Video game storytelling has advanced so much in the last decade or so, but what would you say is the biggest challenge that remains?

It's very easy to show a player a story. The harder part is to get them to participate in it and react to how they participate.

It wasn't easy to step away from BioShock, but I saw an opportunity to take on some risk creating a new IP

I don't think there's one way to make games, but personally, as a narrative games maker, I've never been a big fan of cutscenes because they're not interactive. One of the reasons Judas is taking so long is trying to figure out how we get the game to be substantially more responsive to player decisions. That's a really hard problem, and that's why you don't see a ton of it [in games].

Our industry is over 50 years old and we still don't really know what it is, what games are. By the time movies were 50 years old, they were making Citizen Kane. It's changed somewhat [since then], styles have changed, but they had it pretty well figured out by the 1940s – we haven't.

Now I think