The recent title Red Faction was a good example of the kind of thing you describe where you start to wonder half way through if you’re working for the bad guys…very well done.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/conferences/tgc_2009/6021-TGC-2009-How-a-Board-Game-Can-Make-You-Cry

Maybe a better way to say it is, “a character that presented himself as a ‘good guy’ is actually just a deceiver or deceived”

Think of the voice of Screwtape letters. The ‘protagonist’s’ uncle presents the other side as the ‘enemy’ and we quickly discover that the ‘enemy’ is God. And you start to discover all the tactics that Screwtape uses to lead God’s people astray. What if the main character of one story is ‘Wormwood’ and in another story, one of the families he inflicts.

Or what if your protagonist is lured into serving in an organization that at first blush seems entirely benign, but as the character gets drawn deeper in, they start to see the cracks and the darkness that lies beneath.

As the story teller, you get to start with the lies the protaganist is told, and in some cases, the player agrees with, and then reveal the truth of the matter.

What is interesting about games in particular is that you ask the player to take part in it rather than just observe.

I have a personal objection here that I’m struggling to put into words but I’ll try. It seems to me that modern story telling has embraced a notion that all stories have different sides and no one side is actually ‘right’ or ‘true.’

It’s one thing to make this assertion about life where our ability to know all the facts is severely limited. But I think a huge part of what makes story valuable is its ability to lay out an image of right and wrong, good and bad, foolishness and wisdom. The best stories aren’t only a recitation of a given character’s perceptions but also include a kind of moral omniscience that teaches us something about ourselves, the world or God. I don’t imagine Soma will be telling any stories where the good guy can be seen as the bad guy by changing the narrative perspective. That’s not to say that I only want to tell morality tales that lack complexity or ambiguity.

I guess I just deeply believe in Truth and I hope my tales will present Truth as a real and knowable aspect of reality.

Tolkien is an interesting example here. LOTR is widely loved and applauded but somewhere between The Silmarillion and Children of Hurin the voice that was speaking to a much broader audience became one that was really only interesting to a very few hard core fans.

Of course Tolkien himself probably write those other tales more out of his own desire to explore Middle Earth than to have another best seller and I can completely support that, so long as everybody knows that’s the nature of the tale.

All of the sudden, the character you thought was the protagonist the whole time in Episode 1 is revealed to be something different.

The ways that you can explore character and motivation and dramatic need with the same story/myth is very intriguing.

You mention that you’re not interested in telling the same story a second or third time with a different medium.

But, if each inhabitant in this world has a different perspective of the same story or set of events, the stories are different. And the way in which each of these inhabitants come into contact and interact with eachother creates a very rich mythology.

If we can publish the parts of the story in a way that is comprehensive and integrated from the get-go we’ll be able to provide a bundle of pieces that naturally fit into something that doesn’t feel as though the second, third or fortieth pice is just a cynical effort to sell another product.

While I think the possibilities are awesome, and the opportunities for storytelling are just about limitless, I think it’s also important not to over-saturate the market. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, has said that “a ‘stop doing’ list is more important than a to do list”. While he’s not speaking specifically of video games, the basic principle of “less is more” can be true across all mediums. Using Microsoft as an example again, the argument can be made that they have, in fact, over-saturated the market with Halo. Being a huge fan of the franchise, I’d disagree, but not everyone feels the same way.