Eleven years after Irrational's death, Ken Levine is getting ready to bring out another new title, and pre-release marketing has begun for Levine's non-"BioShock" Judas, a sequel to his previous title, BioShock Infinite, which was released in 2013. The game was released in 2013. At least at first glance, it looks quite similar to BioShock. [Courtesy of IGN and Geoff Keighley, we finally have some details about what the heck "Narrative Legos" is, something we've all been baffled by since Levine uttered the words in his GDC speech 10 years ago and then disappeared from the game development world. We've all been baffled by it. It's a tale of branches, but it turns out there are many twigs.

"The Lego metaphor," Levin told IGN, "is a huge thing, an entire level. "I started thinking, 'Can we use sub-elements by hand, not the huge whole levels, but the little bits of dialogue, pieces of art, textures, maps, encounters, loot, all the little pieces that you build up to make a game?'"

Levine, the developer of Judas, Ghost Story Games has designed all of these elements as "modular chunks" that the game procedurally assembles in response to user actions.

Frankly, I have seen many people ridicule this concept as muddy and difficult to understand, but it seems very simple to me. Instead of having two or three clear paths, for example, dark side or light side, paragon or renegade, kill or save the Little Sister, "Judas" seems to adjust the details on the fly as it makes various choices According to Levine, the studio is procedural (though obviously not AI-driven) way, "we've tried to teach them how to make a game that inherently has good levels, a good story, and most importantly, reacts to your actions." According to Levine, this has been "a major R&D challenge."

So, as far as I am concerned, Judah's narrative lego is not confusing at all, and is in fact just a silly term for a simple concept. However, that does not mean that I am not skeptical. Levine states that his goal is to "deliver a game that gamers know themselves as well as they know the game," but in order to deliver on that promise, he needs to build a narrative lego that is so granular that it is almost impossible to produce a coherent game seems to me.

Players do not tend to behave as rationally and predictably as the protagonist of an authored narrative, for example, one of the characters in the game topples back and forth between friendly and angry dialogue, topping the game with my various strange choices It's easy to imagine getting into a situation. I might have the option of reflecting those choices on the relationship meter to set the tone of my conversations with that person, but at that point I'd be out of "narrative lego" territory and into overused RPG territory. [I suppose that's part of the reason we haven't heard from Levin, Ghost Story Games, or Judas himself in years and years. Only time will tell if those lofty promises will be fulfilled when it is released (hopefully in the near future), but for now, I have my misgivings.