 Which brings us to the conclusion the future of computer game storytelling. We're at a stage in the development of computer games where they are starting to develop their very own narrative toolkit and language. This toolkit consists of cutscenes, interactive scripted events, ambient narration, performance as narrative, adventure game architecture, distributional and integrative elements, thought cues, and increasing audio-visual fidelity. In the future, we can expect a further departure from cutscenes, which some feel are intrusive elements in a game because they interrupt the flow of gameplay with a cinematic regime that reduces players to the role of passive spectator. One of the main challenges for future game developers is to make story and gameplay intertwined as seamlessly and as fluidly as possible. Thus, we're seeing more and more attempts to use story elements that feel more like an organic part of the gameplay. We will also see a further diversification of formats in the future. At the moment, we are witnessing the deconstruction of the classic triple-aid blockbuster title that is contained on a DVD and can be played from start to finish within 20 to 40 hours. A major trend is toward episodic games that are serially expanded with downloadable content. We are also witnessing a reduction of game size with titles coming out that work more like short stories and poems while other games are going for epic expansion. Further aspects that we haven't touched on yet and that will play a greater role in the future are the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence to animate non-player characters, whether they be adversaries or allies, and of artificial life software to animate ambient characters. Second, the increasing complexity of game worlds that encompass not only simulated characters but an entire virtual physics and can act as narrative engines for players to enact their own stories. Third, the increasing importance of emergent storytelling in massively multiplayer online games. The user-generated stories in games such as Eve Online are more complex and more intriguing than any narrative structure the designers could ever hope to implement. And fourth, we're also going to bear witness to the development of automated story generation by game engines on the fly. The future will also bring semantic web dialogues, the ability of computer programs to recognize meaning and react to it, which will make dialogue trees of the past something that we won't have to use anymore. And another field in which I see a great future for computer game storytelling is the posing of ethical dilemmas. We're already seeing this today in games like Red Dead Redemption where the player has to make decisions of how they want to interact with the game world and the game world then reacts to the player in different ways, whether they're, you know, performing on the side of the law or whether they're breaking the law. I think games pose a great potential to give players the narrative experience of these ethical dilemmas for the sole reason that games give players the possibility to make choices and have those choices be meaningful. One of the great challenges for storytelling games in the future will be to leave classical quest structures in open world settings. At the moment, as I hinted at before, you have both. You have a game like Red Dead Redemption in which the player can move around the game world freely and partake in different activities or she can decide to take a mission or a quest and progress the story forward. This feels very artificial and you, as a player, definitely notice when you're going for one mode or the other mode of storytelling and interaction. I wish to have games that seamlessly skip between both modes and see great potential for that. And last but not least, one has to stress that storytelling in the medium of the computer game is a form of narration that tells stories for the eyes, the ears, and the hands of the player. And with the upcoming of new interfaces such as the connect or the playstation move these stories are also going to be told for the whole body. When we're talking about action it's not just going to be the pressing of a button. It's going to be going through full body movement. And this offers unforeseen potential to tell stories in a way that cannot be done in any other medium. That's it for my talk. Thank you for your time and your attention. I hope you learned something about storytelling in games in the past, the present, and the future. And I wish you lots of fun with this course. Next week it's going to be about location-based storytelling. And I know I'm going to look at it because I'm very fascinated by the topic. Bye.