June 20th, 2026
I seldom bother reading articles or essays about game design. Many years ago, I eagerly gobbled up everything I could find on the subject, but by the 1990s I grew impatient with the lack of substance in so much of that writing. It seemed as if everything I read was either repetitive of previous writings, trivial, uselessly vague, or just plain wrong. Many of the authors were recent entrants into the field and seized every opportunity to impose their “deep insights” upon the world.
Hence, I haven’t bothered reading any of the recent writings on the subject. However, I recently stumbled across some work by Alvaro Gonzalez that greatly impressed me. He had written about my work on interactive storytelling, and in following up on it, I discovered that he had written other essays as well. They all show up on a website called Medium.com, some of which is publicly available, and some of which is behind a paywall. Alvaro’s writings are publicly available. They’re definitely worth reading.
I worked with Alvaro on my attempt at creating Siboot for the Storytron. He made many important contributions, but it all came to naught when I realized that my design was deeply flawed.
Some of Alvaro’s early work is, well, early. But his learning curve was steep, and he figured out a great deal in a short time. Three of his later essays are particularly noteworthy; they forced me to carefully reconsider my thinking about interactive storytelling. They helped me identify some of the weaknesses in my thinking and formulate some new ideas about the problem.
The first is Unveiling the Post-Truth Chess: A Modern Take on a Timeless Game
https://medium.com/@alvarogonzalez-onetangostudio/post-truth-chess-in-search-of-an-accurate-representation-of-21st-century-worldview-26226e904bda
It’s a striking approach to modifying the game of chess to radically change its dynamics. It’s quite innovative. There are lots of proposals for modifying various classic games, but this one strikes me as especially interesting.
Next is The Grammar of Drama
https://medium.com/@alvarogonzalez-onetangostudio/the-grammar-of-drama-8946ace1cc87
This essay addresses the impact of AI on interactive storytelling. Its message is damning:
The machine can produce narration, but narration is not drama. It can generate events, but events are not enough. It can imitate the visible skin of storytelling while failing to reproduce its inner metabolism. The words move, but too often nothing truly lives beneath them.
...the future of interactive storytelling will not be decided by who can generate the prettiest prose. It will be decided by who understands the grammar of dramatic causality.
This essay addresses the impact of AI on interactive storyte Here Alvaro hits upon a crucial concept that is little appreciated: that drama has its own grammar, its own architecture, and interactive storytelling must use that architecture if it is to be successful.
He then turns to my own work with Storytron, arguing that it presented some important theoretical advances. While I am proud of the advances I developed in Storytron, I don’t think that its model of storytelling was good enough. It modelled storytelling in parts that were too small to be useful. It had characters, props, stages, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and many more elements of storytelling, but assembling them into a storyworld was rather like building a computer out of Lego pieces. Yes, it was theoretically possible, but the pieces were too small for the huge conceptual size of a decent story.
Another weakness in the Storytron technology brought clearly into the light by Alvaro’s writing is its failure to incorporate the grammar of drama. The flaw is intrinsic to the micro-scale of Storytron technology. Applying the grammar of drama to Storytron would be analogous to applying the laws of English grammar to the letters of the alphabet.
The implication is clear: the next step is to build on top of Storytron. We need software that does for Storytron what the classic procedural languages (FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, etc) did for assembly language. This is not a programming problem; it is a problem of conceptualization. We need to develop a conceptual system that applies the grammar of drama to the elements of Storytron.
Perhaps the conceptual frameworks that others have developed for narrative would be useful. I have looked at a number of these. Hamlet’s Hit Points, by Robin D. Laws, is certainly promising; I rather like his system. However, it strikes me as insufficiently detailed for use in interactive storytelling. He developed his system for use by dungeon masters in role-playing games. These people can easily fill in all the necessary details on the fly while running the game; computers are not so competent. Perhaps an extended version of his system might work.
There are a great many books on narrative structure. Many are of little use to our purpose, because they are specific to other media. They might be titled “How to Write a Script for a Movie/Novel that Will Make Millions of Dollars”. There are also academic works that offer greater insight, but at a level of abstraction that cannot easily be translated into algorithms. I shall be exploring this topic in future essays.
Lastly, The Monastery and the Dragon
https://alvarogonzalez-onetangostudio.medium.com/the-monastery-and-the-dragon-3515e121cebf
This piece is about two game designers: Paco Menendez and myself. I had never known of Mr. Menendez; he designed a unique game back in the 1990s, a game that reflected deep thinking and genuine substance. His game was entirely in Spanish, so I was unable to experience it, I am sad to say.
Alvaro’s article was about the fact that both Mr. Menendez and myself left the games industry after demonstrating a strong desire to bring more emotional maturity to games. We both realized that the games industry just wasn’t interested in becoming a medium of artistic expression; it was quite happy making billions hawking fun for youngsters. Our departures demonstrated the emptiness of the industry. In the 1960s, television was condemned for being a “vast wasteland”. Games don’t even rise to that level.
Some of the great statements in The Monastery and the Dragon:
Paco gave us a monastery made of rules and rules are the native material of games.
Crawford was not merely leaving a profession. He was dramatizing a rupture. He was showing, with his own body, that the path of the industry and the path of the medium were no longer the same path.
Interactivity was not a feature, it was the essence.
This is why Crawford’s frustration was so intense. He believed the industry was worshiping the secondary properties of the machine while neglecting its primary one.
Paco built the monastery. Crawford wrote the theology.
The gestures were different.
The wound was the same.
The danger begins when marketing stops serving the work and the work starts serving marketing. The danger begins when spectacle stops heightening interaction and interaction starts justifying spectacle.
A medium loses itself not when it becomes commercial, but when commerce begins to define what the medium is allowed to imagine. A medium loses itself not when it uses spectacle, but when spectacle becomes a substitute for form.
We can produce more content without producing more meaning. We can simulate larger worlds without creating deeper relationships. We can generate endless dialogue without understanding dramatic action. We can make games more profitable while making them less courageous.
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There are so many more deep insights in that essay. It has triggered thoughts that have opened up new vistas for me. Perhaps it is only because I have finally recovered my creative strength after the 30 years in the desert working on interactive storytelling. But Alvaro’s timing was perfect. I don’t know where to go, but I know that I must renew the quest.