The most selling video game in the world, The Sims, is built on a simple idea: manage human beings and create story around it. It seems that storytelling is one of the most important aspect that explains the overwhelming success of this game. Will Wright, one of the creator of the game, explains why storytelling is important in video games.
Here is the interview of Will Wright from Gamespy.com:
> Gamespy: One of the appeals of The Sims is that it creates a story as you go along, following the life of a sim or a family. The second game really seems to play this up: towns have their own stories, families have their own background as you start the game, and players can write their own family history to save along with a photograph of families they create. Were you intentionally trying to build up the story aspect of the game, or did it just naturally grow out of the gameplay?
> Will Wright: Ever since we first started testing the first version of The Sims we noticed that people couldn't play without attaching a story to what they were seeing. This seems to be a natural way in which humans understand, remember, and communicate experiences. Over time we've come to recognize that storytelling is integral to the entire Sims idea and we're always looking for ways to let players create, drive, and share these stories.
I remember that when David Snowden (IBM Cynefin Research Center) made a speech in Sophia Antipolis on Knowledge Complexity in 2002, he gave the example of The Sims as an artefact of storytelling. When game meets management...
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