BioShock - Interview @ Gamasutra

Ken Levine interview at Gamasutra discusing narative, and it's construction, in a games development process.

CN: I guess the analogy I see is that it's like contrasting a film where the director works with the actors and says, "Ad-lib a little bit, work on your lines a little bit. We'll film extra. We'll film more takes." As compared to the film where they stick to the shooting script.

KL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every film has an editing pass. Every film has multiple takes to choose from. We don't have any of that. We have to do all those takes separately. Generally, if you rehearse a play, you're constantly fixing things in the rehearsal process.In general, the position of the [game] writer is, "Give us a script. Thank you very much." No rehearsal, no chance the work with the actors, and no chance to rewrite based on the performance. If you want a great story, guess what? You have to think along these lines. It's just not the normal industry approach.