The Matrix Online Interview
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Q: What are the sort of challenges you come across in writing for a video game which is an interactive medium rather than a more linear story based medium?
A: Scheming to get everybody involved - from every organization to lone wolf players. Hooking them all is a massive undertaking. It's one of the reasons we occasionally have crises that threaten the Matrix as a whole, which all three organizations must work to resolve. But playing the organizations off each other is quite the trick.
There's the problem of player/reader focus. People read every panel, and generally every word, of a comic. Everybody watches the entire movie. Readers seldom skip paragraphs or pages in a novel.
In a massive multiplayer, people receive information at different times, second-hand, during missions, in cinematics, reading the in-game newspaper, through rumor, via word puzzles in the environment, via NPC's it's a spray of story in six directions. Hopefully, everybody gets wet enough. But the fact that not everybody gets everything is the biggest challenge.
