Deus Ex…had a non-stop cast. Where people were walking onstage constantly. And the sequel is even worse. And I tried to even fight this on the sequel and failed at it… Guys would walk on-screen and walk off-screen and then you never talk to them again …

That's Harvey Smith talking to Warren Spector as a guest in a master class Spector was teaching at the University of Texas. Smith and Spector were the designer and producer, respectively, of Deus Ex. You can see part of the conversation here.

And so the best games I think are the ones that take a small set of characters and just repeat them over and over. That's the only chance you have by the end of the game for anyone to care about your characters. The same guys, over and over, repeat exposure…It was one of the basics of storytelling that we as videogame designers weren't yet applying.

Smith talks about how they went back over the story in the final months of developing Deus Ex, trying to build their sprawling characters into the plot more, and trying to give each one some sort of closure. For instance, Gunther Herman' voiceover was added to the Paris mission at the last moment to create this idea that he was watching you from satellites.

"And then you have a big showdown with him in a church, where he's holding a rocket launcher or something." Smith literally shrugs as he says this. I don't blame him. You can credit Deus Ex for many things, but an elegant storyline is not one of them. The narrative elegance they were chasing during the final stages of the game's development is not something you can just put in at the last minute, like a new level or more balanced guns. It has to be the kernel of a game, the very starting point from which you proceed. So it's no surprise that Smith's Deus Ex recollections were tangents after some admiring comments he'd made about the streamlined storytelling in BioShock.

Which is the perfect opportunity to quote BioShock's creative lead, Ken Levine:

Games are really in the Stone Age in terms of storytelling. They're very tied into sort of sixth grade composition class styles of presenting story and structure. A perfect example is you start a game and there's a narrator using forty proper nouns in the opening sequence. From an audience perspective, I think that's the most off-putting thing you could possibly do…What's brilliant about Star Wars from a structural stand point is that there's this giant intergalactic struggle, which we're all familiar with from almost every game we've played, but [George Lucas] put it in the focus of a family. From the first couple of movies, you really know very little detail about the universe that doesn't impact that immediate family. That's why people relate to it. The drama comes not from the external elements but from the internal elements.

Ken Levine said that in an interview with me five years ago, when BioShock was just a gleam in his eye. And I think he deserves his share of credit for however far we've come since that Stone Age five years ago.

Which reminds me: it's too bad Hideo Kojima didn't read that interview or attend Spector's master class. Yeah, I just went there. I've played all the way through Metal Gear Solid 4. I earned the right to go there.

Thanks to Matt Keil and Charles Beauchemin for the YouTube link. For more awesome game developer talk, you can download videos of all thirteen of Spector's master classes using a BitTorrent client and this link. Each class is a few hours with a developer. And any one of those is easily worth ten gaming podcasts.