I was commenting yesterday on Patrick’s blog about interactive storytelling. As evidenced by my multiple comments, I was having a bit of trouble expressing my opinion. Thankfully, Ernest Adams came to the rescue with an article today over at Next Generation: Secrets of Interactive Storytelling.

First, the storytelling I described in the aforementioned comments would fall under Ernest’s label of “emergent” storytelling (duh). Second, he boils down gameplay into three phases that neatly explains what I was trying to get across… that from the player’s perspective, all stories are linear because time is always moving forward. The debates in the interactive storytelling community are really all about the implementation of the storytelling, not the definition of it.