Yesterday’s video of Richard Garriott and Warren Spector chatting reminded me that I had a couple of other articles related to him in my Pocket queue. The first is a summary of his recent talk at GDC, in which he criticized the gaming industry (in effect) for borrowing and stealing narrative elements from other media, instead of innovating:

He identified the four things that games do that make them unique; he castigated gaming’s continued reliance on arcane reliance on virtual dice rolls; he detailed a taxonomy of the five different kind of narratives in games.

Wrapping up, Spector encouraged designers to concern themselves more with building “sets” and not “worlds.” He encouraged developers to concern themselves with the importance of non-combat AI by referring to a scene in 2000’s Deus Ex: “We spend no time on going to the women’s bathroom and having people notice. People still walk up to me and say, ‘Wow that was cool.’ That was 13 years ago!”

“But we’ve come a long way, obviously,” he said. “I remember when people would get up on stage here and say, ‘Story doesn’t matter except in movies. It doesn’t matter in games and pornography.’

“We can get partway to where I think we’re capable of going as a medium by borrowing from other mediums, by studying and stealing from them, but we can only go so far. We need some original ideas, tough problems solved.

Spector actually raises this same theme in his chat with Richard Garriott, if you listen for it. And it’s become something of his go-to theme these days, this idea that the gaming industry needs to break free of its well-worn tropes.

It was also recently announced that Spector will begin writing a monthly column for GamesIndustry International, which “will dive into serious subjects about the industry and will pose questions that Spector himself may not have the answers to.” The first one should be out some time this week, so watch for it!