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Today's Playing Catch-Up, a weekly column that dares to speak to notable video game industry figures about their celebrated pasts and promising futures, speaks to Jane Jensen, creator and designer of Sierra’s Gabriel Knight series of adventure games, and co-founder of casual games publisher Oberon.

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As the creative figure in the director’s chair for the groundbreaking adventure Gabriel Knight II (also known as The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery), Will Binder is the unequivocal master of game directing. His credits in Hollywood include work on “Scent of a Woman” and “Greedy”. Co-working with game designer Jane Jensen and directing the talents of Dean Ericksen, Joanne Takahashi, and the remaining cast of Gabriel Knight II, Binder has shown a remarkable ability to create exactly the right ambience for this much loved game. At the heart of his directing lies the same love of a great story that typifies the storyteller, and that is perhaps how we can best understand Binder—as a storyteller whose words are painted in the visual canvas. We are honoured to have the opportunity to interview him. In this interview, we discuss with him the technical behind the scenes magic of Gabriel Knight II, learn that he is also a gifted oil painter, and discover some exclusive snippets about his future scripts and projects.

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This scene sent chills down my spine. The human race has become a collection of cattle, shoved into the ghettos to be controlled and handled. It was a terrifying portrait of lost humanity; we didn't even have the ability to create new life. That chill I felt wasn't created by the graphics: the writing did it.







Half-Life 2 is loaded with powerful moments like this, and the writing worked with the technology to make the game a modern classic. Bad writing could have turned the same game into a B-novel of the ripest variety. But the very success of the game points up the weakness of game writing in general, and it begs the question: why don't we have more examples of scenes like this? What, exactly, is the problem?

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Great writing comes from converting the energy of experience into product, and there is far more vitality in scouring the world at large for source than relying on someone else's pre-chewed, pre-digested output. Creating an open experience, a fully interactive and enriched game experience, is new and scarcely-plundered territory for gamers, but we need to pursue it in order to avoid the mainstream Michael Bay effect that diminishes story as productions chase the wallets of the lowest common denominator.







Ian's piece is certainly an interesting look at what an industry veteran thinks about how to improve the writing in games. One thing everyone agrees on is that this isn't easy to do, and will mostly likely be a gradual process as people work through the problems, both financial and creative, to making gaming an art form with story and characters just as good as those in movies, television, or even novels.







Next week we'll hear from someone who makes her living writing games and deals with these problems every day. Stay tuned.

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