"What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story"-Game Developer Magazine

Annotated Bibliography
In the article "What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story" by John Sutherland, the author outlines the basics of classic storytelling and explains how they are applicable to game design. Sutherland emphasized that video games are a type of story not just a toy. He explains that basic story structure includes a hero, inciting incident, a gap between the hero and ordinary life, and then a risk and unexpected reversals that take place. The hero has to overcome difficulties to reach an 'object of desire." Sutherland outlines the types of conflicts which include Internal, Interpersonal and External, and explains that external conflict often happens most naturally in movies and games. He suggests that having writers involved in game design from the beginning is important for overall story structure, not just intermittent dialog.

My Thoughts
The idea of story is something that applies to game design but also to educational design and many other forms of design and creativity. Even when composing a photograph, a good photographer will look at a scene and try to tell a story through an image. Stories are what makes for compelling material, whether it is educational or entertaining. Though it is very important for educational designers to keep in mind, since motivation is often one of the main obstacles that teachers and educators face. If the interaction design provides motivation through a story line, not only will students want to participate, but the hope is that they will learn more deeply because they are able to connect information into a structure or context that allows them to access the information and recall it more readily.
Even in areas like museum design, there should be a story in place, so that all the exhibits are not isolated and disjointed, but flow together to tell a cohesive story that engages visitors. For example, one of the more interesting museum designs that I have heard about recently was in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. where visitors are given an identity card, and they experience the museum through the story of their person, and at the end they find out if they went to a concentration camp or if they survived etc. This really drives home the idea of story within education and museum spaces.