"Short Games, Long Stories"

I wrote a brief article for the IGDA Newsletter (link below) about writing stories for casual games. The point of the article was to toss out some ideas about ways to approach casual game writing, rather than try to write a "how to" guide.

Basically, I recommend (against my better instincts) using traditional story structures and stereotypical characters in order to simplify the player's task of digesting the plot. The analogy that I used in the article, and that I really like, is the "gutter" in comic strips. That white space between two panels has nothing in it, but the human imagination fills in everything that could have been written there. In much the same way, all you need to do to create a story is to suggest where you are in the story arc and what the characters are thinking; there is no need to be more explicit than that. The player's imagination is more than capable of connecting the links and filling in the details.

Hope you like it.

Short Games, Long Stories

Clarion West Write-a-thon

I'm in it again this year, with hopes of a somewhat more productive effort than last year (when pretty much the only words I wrote were in the e-mail requesting that they sign me up).
The idea behind the Write-a-thon is that alums of the workshops write, and donors offer whatever they can based on the goals that the writer achieves. Donations can be for the whole effort, or for the weekly goals, or whatever else seems appropriate. The money goes to Clarion West, a non-profit organization that runs a yearly six-week intensive speculative fiction writing program.
My plan is to complete one short story per week, just like the workshop participants do. So far, with week 1 down, I have finished re-edits on a piece I did for an anthology. The title is "Teh afterl1fe," based on which you can probably guess a lot about the story.

How to watch the World Cup of soccer

1. Visit a non-US site in order to get information from a place that takes the sport seriously. The BBC is good; goal.com is fine. There are many of them. ESPN is not recommended.
   
2. Pee first. Unlike US football, soccer does not break for a few minutes every fifteen seconds. It breaks every 45 minutes (except for fouls). Note: US broadcasters tend to ignore this reality; watching the 1990 world cup at my brother's house I missed a goal because there was a commercial break. A "Broadcaster, please" moment.
   
3. Relax. Unlike US football, where you watch with intense concentration for a few seconds then can then go wax the car, soccer is watched with little concentration but in long doses. Open a beer (if you're rooting for the UK or Germany), bottle of wine (France, Italy), or Coke (if you're rooting for Atlanta, which doesn't have a team, so you're not actually watching soccer).
   
4. Learn what the "offsides" penalty is. This will take care of 98% of your "WTF happened that guy was about to score!" moments.
5. You cannot use your hands in soccer. This should help you understand the remaining 2% of your "WTF happened that guy was about to score!" moments.
6. Dig in for the long run. There are 32 teams and a month of games; this isn't some best-of-seven wham-bam-thank-you-coach.
7. Don't set your hopes on the US. Not that they don't have a good team, but when bookies rank them outside the Top 10 you better be ready for some disappointment. Remember: Bookies care more than any other human beings about how well the teams do.
   
8. Think about calling it "football." Why? A sub-list:

• It is actually only played with your feet.
• The other 7 billion inhabitants of the world call it football.
• Your neighbor who speaks Spanish calls it football.
• I call it football, and it's my blog.

Gooooooooooal!

John Joseph Adams' new e-zine launched today, and it's a beauty.
It's e-book friendly and has a great layout (thanks to the awesome web design of Jeremy Tolbert), but what's best is the fiction (thanks to editor/slush readers Christie Yant and Jordan Hamessley [@thejordache]). Clarion co-detainee Vylar Kaftan has the lead story, and it is as great an SF-built love story as you could want. Vy has been writing consistently great stuff since I met her in 2004, and this one is worthy of the lead page in a great new on-line Sf destination.
So go, read, and become instantly cooler.
www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Why Ebert Still Doesn't Get It

It has been some time since Roger Ebert's first claim that video games
are not art, and he has come out with a second
diatribe supporting the same statement. In this case, he writes his
essay as a response to Kellee Santiago's TED talk. Poor Santiago, who
didn't realize that she was debating rather than presenting.

Personally,
I don't really care about Ebert's definitions of art, nor do I
particularly like the games that Santiago recommends as examples. In
fact, I chortlingly agree with Ebert when he refers to the story in
"Braid" as something that "...exhibits prose on the level of a wordy
fortune cookie."

But he's still wrong, and to me the reasoning is
still pretty simple. If I write a short story, one can argue that I
have committed art. In public, no less. When I create characters,
narrative, story arcs and moments of drama, that is art. Perhaps not
high art, perhaps not fine art, but certainly art. When game writers
like Marc Laidlaw or Richard Dansky write a non-game novel, they are
writing art. And yet, when we put these same skills and the same craft
into a video game, suddenly it is not art anymore. Dude, where's my art?

Suddenly,
the illustrator who does graphic novels or posters or book covers and
is now doing games, isn't doing art anymore. Somehow to Ebert the
collective creation of all these artistic minds is less than the sum of
its parts; we start out with talented artists (I'm not necessarily
including myself in that) using their skills to their utmost, and manage
to end up with non-art. Sub-art. Pseudo-art.

Which of course, if
you think about it, makes absolutely no sense.

It's an uphill
struggle to talk to someone like that about games, because it is
difficult to explain the artistic nature of games to someone who has not
played one. Until a person grapples with a game like "Passages" or
"Flower" (which Ebert does not understand... because he has not played
it) it is unlikely that they will understand some of the subtler effects
of a game. Guess what? I'd have a pretty free time arguing films
weren't art if I'd never seen one. Or if I'd only seen stuff by Michael
Bay.

Ebert also goes off on tangents that are nothing short of
bizarre, for instance stating that Stravinsky, Picasso, and Beckett were
not trying to communicate ideas to an audience. Why? Because Santiago
says that games do that, and it is why games are art. Therefore, in
Ebert's world, other forms of art cannot do that. Mr. Ebert, if you do
not believe that Picasso wished to communicate ideas to an audience in
order to engage them I have one word for you: "Guernica." But gosh, what
am I thinking? It would be ridiculous to even fantasize that Beckett
wrote plays because he had, you know, ideas to communicate.

Ultimately
Ebert decides that art is some indefinable thing that occurs to
imitations of nature as those imitations pass through the artist's soul
and become something indefinable. He ends up  admitting, after all, that
we know what is art and we can define it because it is a matter of
taste.

And there we have the crux of his argument. Video games
are not art, because Roger Ebert does not like them.

I shall,
respectfully, disagree.

Why It's Harder to Write Stories for Games Than Any Other Medium

Developing a story for a game is a unique experience, as no other medium presents quite so many complexities and roadblocks in getting the story across to the audience. I believe that this is the case because, to make a great game story, you need to:

1. Come up with a great story,

2. Break it into digestible chunks, and

3. Present those chunks appropriately.

Movies and novels don't have the same weight of story, because you can't go explore what happens off camera or away from the page. And in any case, both of these are uniform, single-experience media whose number of digestible chunks is 1 (though one could argue about chapter structure for the written word and scenes for film and theater. But not here). The real problem for a game story (and it is unique to game story) happens at number two on the above list, and it is compounded by non-linearity.

Part of the problem is that there is an awful lot of what you could call 'story' in a game. Not merely the pieces of the plot and what is going on, but all the elements of character histories, world history, geography, social structures, item descriptions, famous places and events, side quests or missions... it goes on and on.

Somewhere and somehow, all that data has to be distilled, portioned, cut into appetizing bite-sized chunks, and served up as an irresistible dish. Furthermore, those chunks have to be proportional to the time of play. I underline that, because doing a point-and-click adventure game does not permit a developer to force upon a player MGS-length cutscenes (come to think of it, maybe nothing should...). For a casual game, the story may have to be cooked up in chunks the length of newspaper comics or stand-up jokes -- maybe 5 to 30 seconds. Longer games, with longer play times and a longer expectation of B.I.C., can certainly cope with longer story moments.

Next, of course, we do have to face the question of linearity, branches within the story, and all the joy and pain of knitting them into a coherent experience. The pieces of story need to complete a comprehensible puzzle regardless of the order in which the player experiences them; it is bad form to either skip or repeat plot events.

Once the story is broken down and laid out, however, an important piece of work remains to be done because each of the story elements has to be prioritized. My first real game writing project was as Assistant Writer to Richard Dansky on Dark Messiah. Richard created a spreadsheet of all the story elements that coud be included in the game, then went through and prioritized them:

"1" was for the critical plot elements, without which the actions of the player and the objectives we gave them would not make sense. This would be more or less the spine or throughline of the story.

"2" was for all the elements that went a little deeper, explaining motivations and the reasons for what was happening in the main plot.

"3" was all the world history andd setting detail for the obsessives -- for the players like me who went around reading the tomes in Neverwinter Nights.

Without a system like this, the player risks either getting irrelevant or uninteresting information or not understanding why they're doing what they're doing.

The difficulty in story design goes beyond the balance between the scope and the priorities of all the story elements, however, because once all that is done we still have to work out how to deliver them. Cutscenes? Voice over dialogues? Quicktime events? Optional dialogues? Environmental elements? Side quests? As part of artifact / skill descriptions? Ingame books, movies, or audio tapes? Information in the manual or marketing material on the web site?

And, finally, it all has to be written well, and the cutscenes have to be too interesting to skip, and every bit of text has to be a mini-Easter egg of information and style.

So the next time you play a game and pass judgment on the story, think twice. A lot of thinking and preparation goes on behind the scenes, and the challenges faced by the writers and designers are considerable. I cannot think of another medium in which so many different factors weigh in the effective transfer of story from the minds of the creators to the minds of the audience. And if there is such a medium, I am not sure that I would want to work in it...

"Non-Casual Story in Casual Games"

Back in December I submitted a proposal with the above title for a presentation at the Casual Connect conference (Hamburg, 10-12 February 2010). I had a fairly rapid 'yes' from the organizers, which was very kind, so I put together my current wisdom into a presentation.

When I arrived at the conference I discovered why my proposal was so quickly accepted--Yulia Vakhrusheva, one of the organizers of the conference, is a fan of Heroes of Might & Magic V (as well as being energetic, cheerful, and efficient). Go Heroes!

The presentation is now available online with the accompanying audio (about a half hour) on the Casual Connect web site:
http://bit.ly/a0Qwaa
Thanks to Yulia and the other great people at Casual Connect for making the conference so much fun.

And thanks as well to a few indie developers who came up to chat with me afterward, interested in game story and gameplay:
Brian Meidell: www.mindflow.dk
David Mekersa: www.enigma-project.com
Alexander Dergay: www.discordtimes.com

It's always great to talk shop with smart people.

New PC

I finally had to give up on my three year-old Dell laptop. The battery no longer functions so it is essentially a portable desktop, it overheats and shuts down after a couple hours of use and some of the motherboard level functions no longer work (trackpad settings, power management, etc.).
I decided to go light, so I bought what is essentially a large netbook, the ACER 1810TZ. So far the little guy is just phenomenal--light, fast, stable, and with a usable keyboard. What I discovered that was interesting was that after doing the basic PC set-up (setting the usage parameters, removing Office and MS Works and IE, the usual stuff :) was that there are apparently 17 programs that I cannot live without. I therefore downloaded and installed the following software, which after many years of messing about with all sorts of packages have turned out to be the ones that keep me going:

1. Firefox--I like Chrome better as a browser, but the extensions make Firefox an incredibly useful application (FTP, better security, Gmail improvements, productivity tools,...)
2. OpenOffice--Unlike the MS Office suite it's stable, simple, and...free.
3. Zone Alarm--Because you must have a firewall (free).
4. AVG--ditto an antivirus; ditto that it's free.
5. ITunes--for music and podcasts.
6. Chrome--another browser that is lighter and faster than Firefox.
7. Thunderbird--for offline mail; not as complete as Outlook but free and reliable.
8. CCleaner--any Windows PC needs a tool to clean out all the crap that gets left behind in daily operation, and this one works very well. And is free.
9. Celtx--an open-source package for formatting and writing scripts, graphic novels, storyboards, etc. (free).
10. Paint.net--Excellent free image manipulation package; a 'Photoshop lite" that has more features than Picasa.
11. Skype--ET phone home. For free. With video.
12. VLC--Forget QuickTime and the Windows Media software, this plays all of their formats plus Flash and anything else. It's free.
13. ReadPlease2003--Reads text out loud (sounds like GLaDOS :). Excellent to hear another voice reading what you wrote back to you. And... free.
14. Tweetdeck--How I do my twittering. There may be better ones, but this seems to be fine for me.
15. Sonar--For tracking story submissions to agents and editors. Just so much easier than a spreadsheet.
16. DropBox--An amazing (and, of course, free) program that synchronizes files between different computers. In other words, up to 2 GB of storage in the Internet cloud for things that you are working on and don't want to lose.
17. Mozy -- a net-based back-up system that runs in the background and prevents those horrible "oops" moments.
    

ACER in hand, I go forth boldy...

Cool "Making of" video for R.U.S.E. game

Here you can find a video from Ubisoft and SolidAnim that exposes some of the details on how we did the story development and cutscenes for RUSE. The content is interesting if you're curious about how video game cutscenes are made, but the studio went all out and added a ton of Minority Report style special effects to the video presentation itself.
I sort of wish that they had chosen other cutscene excerpts (one of the voices in a couple of the scenes was not done so well), but the presentation and content are well done.
A separate one will be coming out that focuses on the writing and story development.
Watch and enjoy!

Game writing video interview for Clash of Heroes

 
Here is a video interview that we did for the Clash of Heroes game, subtitled on a German site (it's about halfway down the page).
The point was to explain how we took a universe built for a 60-hour PC TBS game (Heroes) and FPS/RPG-style games (Dark Messiah) and condensed it down to the DS platform.
Unfortunately, the interview is missing most of what we said about the development team at Capybara, in particular Kris and Dan. They are the guys that took our storyline and characters and actually created the missions and the quests and the dialogs. They deserve a lot more credit than they get in this video, particularly as the real gameplay and story integration was done by them.

Story on Escape Pod

My story that first came out in Interzone is up on Escape Pod as a free listen. Thanks to the team there for taking it and to Geoff for the great reading.
 
http://escapepod.org/2009/12/10/ep228-everything-that-matters/

Steamed up

Steamed up

As a consumer I find Pitchford's comments to be ridiculous, and Wardell's to be whiny. I have used a number of on-line venues to purchase game content--Steam, GOG, D2D. Steam is hands-down the most effective in stability, support, ease of purchase, ergonomics, content patches, everything.

It's too bad that other studios have to go through a competitor's platform to sell games, though one could wonder why they didn't think of it themselves five years ago and do it first. Valve came up with a good idea and has been constantly improving the implementation. Frankly, as someone who buys games, I think that's great.

In fact, the basis of the complaints seems to be purely financial. There has never been a breath of scandal that Valve plays favorites, delays or slows competitor's offerings, dishes out unequal access, or commits any other form of unethical practice. In fact, it's worth noting that every single comment that came out as a response to Pitchford's original diatribe has stated that Valve could, but doesn't. After all, just because Valve also comes from Seattle doesn't mean that they use Microsoft's business practices.

Why does Steam have a 70% market share? Why are so many of us happy using it? Maybe it's because it works.

Real multiplayer games

It's a recent tradition in our family to buy the kids games for their birthdays. We are lucky to have a major game conference near us every February, which coincides nicely with Louis' and Zoé's birthdays. We go down every year, meet up with manic Kurt McClung, and peruse the latest and greatest.

It should be noted that the games in this case are board games, not computer games. Why? Because board games can be played as a family. Because boards games don't require that everyone own a battery- or electricity-draining device that costs from $150 to $500 (plus a copy of the $40 to $60 game, one for each player...). Because board games are portable, non-linear, age-indifferent, replayable, and they have better graphics. I'm not kidding about this; take a look at the maps, cards, counters, and dice in a game like Jamaica or Dixit or Keltis and you'll see what I mean. They are increasingly solid, well-crafted, and beautful; a pleasure to handle and play with. They are tangible and can be used even during an electricity blackout, given a sufficient supply of candles. Fifteen years from now you can take them out of the closet and play them, regardless of where polygon counts and graphic cards are.

Over the last few years we have purchased a number of excellent ones, the kids' favorites being Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Keltis, and Kyogami. This year we added Jamaica and Dominion, and I'll probably get Dixit  for Zoé (please don't tell her!).

So these birthday gifts made me think about comparing video multiplayer games to classic ones. For me it's interesting, because as enjoyable and wonderful and replayable as board games are, they do not have a formal story. What they have are unpredictable and anecdotal sequences of events that are great to live and great to re-tell, except for that inevitable "...but I guess you had to be there" ending. What is curious is that a hot topic for game designers and academics these days is "emergent story" (or emergent narrative because it has more syllables), meaning that the players generate their own story through their actions as they play the game (yes, that's a gross simplification, but it's the basic idea). This, as far as I can tell, what has been going on since the makers of Clue (a.k.a. Cluedo) gave the opportunity of mixing up the weapon, the place, and the suspect. This sounds reductionist, but it should be. We're taking two of mankinds three oldest activities -- telling stories and playing games -- and pretending that by adding a computer to the mix things have become radically different.

What is true is that game developers have a sort of Shangri-la vision of a future game system where the computer is another, unpredictable player; imagine what would happen if Colonel Mustard took the secret passage from the Conservatory to the Lounge halfway through the game, or  if a peasant army in Kamchatka fought back against your tray full of ten-army towers, or if there was a real estate crisis halfway through Monopoly and people started running to invest in 'safe' markets like railroads and utilities?

In truth, it would seem to me to be simply an unexpected twist on the old gameplay; merely an added dimension to an already well-worn (if well-loved) path. Primarily because I don't think that story generated this way will be able to provide the same sort of sense of tension / climax / resolution that a well-structured tale provides. It is, however, very tempting to think about it.

But remember--the next time you do a raid in WoW or fight off a competing guild in EVE, retelling it to those who weren't there is about as much fun as hearing the blow-by-bow of your last awesome RISK smackdown.

Review up for Black Static 11

Though horror is less my cup of tea than other spec fic genres, I enjoyed the magazine immensely. It seems to me that the editorial board at TTA has done a great job of choosing eclectic, intelligent, and very well-crafted tales for all of their titles. A few of them were real attention-grabbers, particularly "None Had Sharp Teeth" and "Out with the Furies."

My review of the six tales in the magazine can be found here, at Tangent Online:

http://bit.ly/ATe2y

When Designers Have Story Problems

I attended a great panel at the Austin GDC where Chris Avellone and Christian Allen (designers) discussed game writing and game design with Andy Walsh and Rhianna Pratchett (writers). It was a good debate with a few barbs on either side, presenting the problems that games developers have putting story into games.

However, at one point, I got really annoyed. One of the designers made a comment about the problems they have when the action has to stop so that "the writer's" story can be told at that point in the game.

Why was I annoyed? Because either: 1) Your game needs a story, or 2) It does not. If you are in the former situation for whatever reason (the market wants it, the IP has always done it, the producer insists on it, etc.), your job is pretty simple as a designer: Work the story into the game design.

So, let's look at the moment where, in the middle of some exciting gameplay, the designer feels that they are being made to stop the fun part to advance the story (Mary de Marle did a great presentation about this as well at the Austin GDC). Here is why I don't see this as 'writefail:'

1. It is unlikely that the writer suddenly walked in the door, handed the designer a story outline, and said "Change your level design because at this point in the action we have to have a cutscene." What is more likely is that the story documents have been laying around for weeks or months, either halfheartedly skimmed or largely ignored by the design team. In effect, the writer might be saying: "Remember this?"

2. It is equally possible, if designers find themselves in this situation, that the story is something that has been tacked on late in the development process. Not, shall we say, 'best practice.'

3. Story, if done well (and I assume we all want to do things well), is pervasive in a game. The environment, the audio effects, the character designs, the dialog, the level design, the tools or weapons, everything is part of the story. The story is not text and cutscenes; it is atmosphere and NPC actions and quests and marketing and everything else. A designer must know what the story is supposed to be doing in their level, because the story should be everywhere in their level.

4. Also, like the rest of game development, story is collaborative. Writers understand that changes in level design will require story changes; no one expects things to be otherwise. However this cuts both ways; the level design may have to change to accommodate the narrative. Admittedly it is rare, as on a per-hour basis writing is cheaper to change than level design, and it should only happen early in the design process. But it can, has, and will happen.

5. Last but not least, the story is not the writer's story; it is part of the game design. It is the team's story. If there is a sense that the story is some foreign entity infecting the rest of the design process, the whole project has a problem.

The simple fact is that level design and game design cannot be done in a vacuum. Just as the designer's work dictates other parts of the game, there are other parts of the game--like the story--that influence what the designer's limits may be.

It should never happen that a story element parachutes down to take the designer by surprise and force him to change his design and his gameplay and generally make his life miserable. That's not 'writefail,' that's 'gamedevelopmentfail.'

My review of Interzone 222

 
In short, it can be found here, at Tangent Online.

As always, I enjoyed both the range and the content of the stories. I think that one of Interzone's strong points is the mix of tales that it presents; you never quite know what you may be in for next when you read it.

Good YBSF News!

In a gesture of extreme coolness, Gardner Dozois has included my story from Interzone 219 in the "Honorable Mentions" list in his Year's Best Science Fiction anthology. I would have thought that at my age there would be nothing that could make me incoherent with glee. I was wrong.

If you are curious, an e-version of the Interzone in question can be purchased for $5 from Fictionwise.com:
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook78425.htm

5 workplace skills for a different future...

Reading the Institute for the Future's blog on workplace skills of the future, http://www.iftf.org/node/2774, I had a hard time swallowing words like "Emergensight," "Influency," and "Longbroading." I offer here my somewhat more dystopian view of what will be required of us in the future workplace...

1. Sociagiene. With the development of superbugs and pandemics, any area (such as the office) where multiple people come into contact must be entered and exploited with a great deal of care. The way that we as workers deal with public hygiene -- and the social consequences of that -- will have an growing impact on our business lives.

2. Chafftrol. As an increasingly vast number of communication channels dilute one's ability to trap pertinent messages, a lot of time is going to be spent trying to separate wheat from chaff. This will become increasingly difficult as only a single interface -- the browser -- is becoming the preferred medium for personal and professional communication, PR, marketing, shopping, discussion, and entertainment. If you add to this the tendency of social networks to over-react to any stimulus and explode into massive chaff generators, the wheat will become increasingly hard to find.

3. Consterm. As the availability of energy and water continues to shrink, any decision about how, when, and where to work will be increasingly determined by the balance of these scarce resources. Overhead costs reflected in heating and plumbing are likely to rise, and contract terms and performance targets will start to include consumables.

4. Langfusion. As work becomes increasingly cross-cultural and international, it will become critical to understand other people's English, either as spoken or as poorly rendered by a free translation service. The world is evolving to a point where most speakers of English will be non-native, taught by other non-natives. This is particularly important since Americans cannot in general communicate in a foreign language, and often in English either.

5. Panrentomy. Moves by any organization that creates anything (from movies, songs, and books to computers, cars, and housing) to turn their product that you purchase into a service that you rent will fundamentally change the way you live and work. In a few short years, the only thing that you purchase that you will actually own and have the right to consume as you wish will be the food you eat. Be prepared to deal with copyright statutes that control how you use document templates, computer hardware, office facilities, and kitchen appliances.

A Simple View of Game Story

What is a story? It can be defined this way: A story is characters, with goals, fighting against obstacles to achieve those goals -- or failing nobly in the attempt. Don't quote me on this, it's a fairly standard definition that I pulled from Orson Scott Card's "How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy."

One can get analytical and academic and discuss lots of increasingly theoretical details and structures, but it's really actually about that simple. And whether your story resembles "Pride and Prejudice" or "No Country for Old Men", it's pretty much going to have those elements. I repeat: Characters, with Goals, Struggling to Achieve them. That's been the basis of a good story ever since Og first regaled his fellow cave dwellers with how he opened a crock of whup-ass on a sabertooth tiger.

But if you want to look at this from a game developer/designer's point of view, you might think about doing a bit of mathematical substitution:

Characters = Player-Avatars
Goals = Objectives
Struggling = Gameplay
Achieve = Rewards.

Which gives us this:

"A game story is player-avatars, with objectives, using gameplay to achieve those objectives (get rewards)."

Okay, it's not Shakespeare. But it's something. And it actually gives us an interesting look at where traditional story and this whole newfangled game thing might have some basic building blocks in common.

Which begs the question: "If it's that simple, why doesn't it work?"

There are a few reasons, I think, but I am by no means the first and last authority on this.
1. Characters
They are often 2D paper doll imitations of well-known stereotypes. If a character is predictable, it's hard to get too fired up by her problems. See the comments to my previous Gamasutra blog post for some good thoughts on this.
2. Goals
What the character wants might not make sense, or might not be realistic, or, on the other hand, might have been done in a much more direct and simple way if there wasn't a lead designer involved... Besides, since the goal is generally "Save the World/Universe/Species," it often lacks interest. Goals are too often epic, but not personal.
3. Struggling
It's not unusual that the story occurs in parallel to and independent of the gameplay -- the classic set-up of lots of gameplay, then a cutscene where other things happen that advance the story. While the gameplay unlocks the story, it doesn't always drive, enhance, or enrich it. Necessarily, the story equation starts to fall apart. If what the player is doing isn't the story, we no longer have one.
4. Achieve
We're usually pretty good on this one. Whether it's rankings, virtual gold, cutscenes, bragging rights, or power-ups, one thing you can guarantee is that success is rewarded. However, if it isn't tied into the struggling and the goals of the character, why should the player-avatar care?

So though the definition appears deceptively simple, there seem to be a lot of weak links in the way that we execute it.

Which fantasy writer am I?

http://www.helloquizzy.com/results/which-fantasy-writer-are-you

Obviously, in the spec fic field it's making the rounds. I came up with Philip Pullman, and a lot like Tove Janssen. I don't mind being associated with the "anti-Narnia" crowd. On the four scales that go from -25 to +25, I measured :

• Slightly more High-brow than Low-brow (3). Literary upbringing, pulp fiction tastes. Makes sense.
• Much more Peaceful than Violent. (-19). Color me Quaker.
• Barely more Experimental than Traditional (1). Experiment is fine, but it has to have a point.
• More Cynical than Romantic (5). But not much. It must be living in France that did it to me.