First off, let me say I'm sorry for responding to your response at so late a date, but I actually sketched off my comment right before leaving on a short trip so just got back to my internet connection. And when I return I find you will no longer be posting on video game writing. Here I've sat, reading your posts for months, I finally get the courage to post a comment, only for it to be my last chance to do so! So I decided to be rude and respond to an old post. Second off, let me say thank you for your posts. As a prose writer who's a gamer, I've always been interested in writing for games, but couldn't really understand how it was done. I had thought that it must be vaguely like writing a choose-your-own-adventure book, but beyond that I just didn't get it. I've gained a much better understanding from your posts. I still could never design and create a game on my own, but I have a much greater appreciation for what does go into making one. Third off, rebuttal! Well, kind of. When I said concise, I definitely did not mean short. And to me, story is not merely a recounting of events, and it's definitely not just a plot outline you hand to the reader/player and say, “There you go! Do with it as you will! And have fun blowing stuff up.” I'm not familiar with Roy Blount Jr.'s work, but from what you say and have said in previous posts, he sounds like a writer who has no superfluities in his work. That might sound odd, but you say he rambles, goes off at tangents but then ties it all together. Seems to me, the rambling, the tangents, that's the story. I had a teacher when I was kid, he was the advisor of our storytelling club. He was from the South, had a soft, slow drawl and was kind of a shy guy, but he told tall tales and scary stories better than all the professional storytellers I've met since. What he taught our club was that all the descriptions, all the repetitions were what made the story. They set up the tension, created a rhythm and turned a chain of events that could be described in about 45 seconds into a full experience that stays with you for years. Or millenia, if you're talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey. And while Mr. Blount may not have had the years Homer did to perfect his stories, I still bet he worked awful hard to get each sentence just right. And as for turning on and off light switches, well, I think they're fun because they are character building. (And involve Trogdor, but still, my point stands!) At Telltale you guys seem to do it so naturally, but when the “extras” in a game don't match, they stand out like a sore thumb. Like Twilight Princess. The bug girl with her side quest, mini-game thing always bothered me. She's cute and all, and her gothic lolita/Victorian styling does kind of fit into Twilight Princess what with the Old West town near the Gorons feeling like a Native American village lifted out of an episode of the Wild, Wild West (Only without the B-52 hairdos.), but catching bugs is really kind of a weird thing to do when the world is falling apart. And her house was really cool looking, but it looked like a little too much work went into it. Like, almost as much work as went into the Zora world which is supposed to be a much more important location, but is far less distinctive and imaginative than Bug Girl's house. In comparison, the side quests in Psychonauts really added to the game. The scavenger hunt is the kind of thing you expect to find at a summer camp, and it's good training in your powers. Plus a lot of the extras like reading the tree rings at the monument in the parking lot are funny, and help to explain more about the world in the game. You can get through just fine without them, but they actually add depth if you take the time to enjoy them. That's what I think excites me most about games. The ability to really explore the world created for us. Not in the open sandbox sense, but the ability to experience the story in different ways. When I come up with a story I have to figure out the best way to tell it, and I stick to that one telling. You can maybe do the flashbacks of different people thing or something similar, but still, I'm the one determining what the reader sees and when and decide everything out before hand. Which I'm fine with. But the thought that I could create a single story that could be experienced different ways, even if they were only subtle differences, that just seems fun. Like in a story I wrote, a character chases after a thief who broke into her room at night. She's half asleep in a strange town and the thief easily loses her, only to be later caught by a cop who'd been ordered to keep an eye on the heroine. In a game, maybe the chase could be played, with two possible results. Either she loses him like in my story, or she catches him, with the cop coming up and nabbing the thief soon after she gets him, but not before the thief mentions a name, a character the player hasn't met yet, but will soon. The end result of the chase is very similar, and it's pretty much still the same story, but the player gets an extra “clue” if they play well. Rather than branching off into different plot lines, it's more like you get slightly different perspectives. And as to word counts, well, if you don't have to deal with them let me just say I wish I could get hired at Telltale! It's hard enough finding magazines that still publish fiction, but a lot of them want 6,000 words or less, AND they want strong characters who develop through the story. I can't do that in 10,000 words. After much blood, sweat and tears I can manage to come up with an idea that fits into around 12,000, but I still end up filing away about 75% of my ideas for those novels I'll write when I get enough published to get an agent. So after writing 1103 words on being concise, I'd like to summarize. I've enjoyed reading about your writing on writing, I'd probably consider Roy Blount Jr. a concise oral storyteller who just happens to write his stuff down, Bug Girls don't belong in Hyrule, but scavenger hunts at camp are fun, and I wish I could write without worrying about a wordcount, too. Thank You, and Good Night.