Completely misleading title IMO. The writer made sure to stress that a game's storytelling should primarily be conveyed by means of gameplay. Gameplay and storytelling are not separate entities, but the gameplay is the story's carrier both in regards of the personal gameplay experience and the big story the game is trying to tell.
[blah blah 4 cents]
So if I understood correctly this means there is as little hard separation as possible. The most blatant version would be an intro cutscene, then you kill X wolves, then you get another cutscene, till the end. You can still have a balance between cutscenes and action parts, but they have hard borders. You can also imbalance it by having large action parts and small cutscenes with little actual story being told or vice-versa.
What I think the future of "storyweaving" is, is the blurring of these borders while enforcing the player to experience the world with open eyes and actively.
One of kind example that comes to my mind would be a certain infamous corpse from Left4Dead that is mentioned in the commentary, thus many people already know about it. At first glance it's just a body under a colorful blanket lying next to a table where the character can stock up on ammo. It's one supply point of many in the game and thus, from a gameplay perspective, isn't all that interesting.
However, the need for supplies enforced by the gameplay drives the player to stumbling across the body. And then they have to think for themselves. How come a body is covered with a sheet? Obviously someone must have put it there, so there was another person that was still alive at that point. Why did he cover exactly that body and no other? Maybe he was his buddy and they had a little base that would explain the supplies. Maybe his friend got caught by the zombies and had to be shot and since he couldn't bury his friend there, he did the least that was possible.
This is where the active imagination that books in a sense also confront you with, but also vice-versa in a way. A book tells you what happened, but you have to imagine how it looks like and fill in details. In my opinion a good game can show you what scenes look like, but forces you to pay attention to detail and make up whatever story is behind all this.
The key to making it a personal experience is to leave blank spots that can be filled by the audience.
It's still incredibly rare for me to see good storyweaving tho. Maybe because I don't buy a lot of games (I like to pretend I go by "quality over quantity"), but maybe because this kind of storytelling requires an expert. You can't write this like a movie or a book. People have realized that you need to meet special requirements when directing a movie because it can supply the audience with pieces of a story a book can't, but a book can also do things a movie absolutely can't. The same goes for games, but in my opinion it's harder than the other two mediums mentioned above because games are active. You always have an X factor. You can reduce that X factor by for example let the protagonist be not a blank slate, but have a distinct personality that appears in cutscenes, so you'll know exactly how other characters will react. Once you open the game with choice systems for example, you don't know what kind of character the player will create. The bigger the X factor, the harder to create the game, but also the more personal the experience.
I have a bit of faith in Eidos here however. The design team was shocked when it was told it have to crate tons of content most players would never see as part of the multi-path system. I just hope the Deus Ex universe will reflect your actions. I especially love it when a game world remembers and reflects little details that other games don't pay attention to.
What were you doing in the Ladies' restroom, Denton?
[/4cents]
