Ken Levine, head honcho for Bioshock (and a host of other spiffy games), has given a talk at GDC where he said that a lot of people don’t particularly care about stories in games.  Gamasutra has a pretty good play-by-play of what he had to say, but here’s a choice nugget:

According to Levine, BioShock operates on three levels. “We did some focus testing on BioShock — and their answer as a focus group of 40 people was… ‘Uh… Madden? Halo 3?’. The truth is that people have no idea of franchises. It’s so hard to understand the experience of actual guys. You have to make the game for people who don’t care.” Levine’s three levels:

Level 1 – “Where do I need to go, who do I need to kill? If you don’t hit those people you will be making those games, as we did at Irrational, that sold 150,000 units.”
Level 2 – “I need to kill this guy Andrew Ryan, there’s that Fontaine guy, there are those little girls. I’m usually in this group in games, some interest in the story.”
Level 3 – “Think about music. There’s the weird kid in the back of the classroom who’s writing all the Nirvana lyrics on his notebook. That’s the hardcore fan… you have to give them all of that love, a novelistic level of detail. That has to be there but it can’t get in the way of the experience of the guy who just plays Madden and Halo.”

“If you want people to follow your plot it has to be really fucking stupid.”

Do you care about story?  If true, is this the developer’s fault for writing crummy stories, or the player’s fault for having a short attention span?

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