I think the dude's seen the worthless stories floating around and somehow decided that means that narrative is bad. I'd disagree with that: his example is that a great battle on its own is a great story, but without the context behind it, it's more like a baseball game. Sure, it's exciting to you; but a critical part of any game (computer or not) is that the player's actions should at least in part depend on the rules of the game, and if your rules are flexible enough to allow your player unlimited creativity then why are you bothering to implement rules in the first place?

There seems to be a whole rich seam of interesting choices in what happens when the player and the rules conflict. Mr. Johnson complains about that, but of course, that's why it's a conflict, and it's up to designers to harness that in a way that is still interesting to the players while perhaps making them think a little about their own actions.

I suspect that the most important story-telling mechanism in games (other than dialogue)will likely be symbolism. Nearly every game uses symbolism to some extent, and so it's not so far a stretch to think that designers will start treating game stories as an extension of game mechanics.

A bad story is certainly worse than no story, but... good lord.

Narrative can be a great tool if used as a device to link diverse parts of the game together. I think problems arise when a completed narrative imposes artificial constraints on gameplay that is still in development.

Sounds pretty dead on to me. I too get tired of being spoon-fed some wannabe film director or novelist's excuse for a story, and would much rather make my own stories.

Emergent story is going to be inherently more meanigful to the player because it's theirs. It's their character and their actions making things happen. I've had some pretty cool and crazy alternate histories come out of games of CivIV.

If I am going to be forced through some other guys story, at least present it in an interactive and interesting way, such as the Valve technique of never taking the player out of control of the character.

What he's saying in that quote there also pretty strongly echoes similar attitudes from Will Wright too, so I can sort of understand now why they're off doing their thing together these days, even if I am bummed about Soren not working on the Civ series anymore.

And lest we forget Will Wright is the guy who made what is presently still the most popular PC game in existence with The Sims, a game with no defined story or characters whatsoever. And Soren created what is probably the best version of Civilization ever made.

So clearly there's some truth there in terms of what the public wants.

I dunno, a lot of those are more conceptual than design oriented.

The #1 design mistake I can think of is failing to allow for customized control schemes. i.e. Forgetting to add an inverted control/no invert option.

A close correlary would be forgetting to use the whole controller. There's nothing more frustrating than having a dual analog controller and not being able to change the camera.

My #2 isn't so much a problem now since the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all save games to internal memory, but in the old days machines had a memory card slot #1 and memory card slot #2.

The problem was games were designed to only look at slot #1. It wouldn't matter how much total space you had on slot #2 the game wouldn't recognize it. You'd have to get up and swap cards. Now that's bad design! Fortunately it's all over now.