This lecture takes on both Joseph Cambell and Robert McKee and shows how their narrative-structure approach is too limited and inappropriate for games. It examines the relationships between various forms of presentational storytelling media - novels, plays, and films - and how our understanding of them has influenced our own approach to designing interactive stories. It looks at the history of these genres and the kinds of things they have been used for, then turns to the question of how that does and does not work in games. It ends by proposing an alternative approach to creating stories for games that doesn't bind us to formulaic methods or conventional structures, and instead puts the player in the center of the narrative process.

This talk continues from the thoughts developed in the author's 2005 GDC lecture, Interactive Narratives Revisited.