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BioShock creative director Ken Levine laid out the basic idea behind "Narrative Legos," a concept for creating emergent game stories that change every time the player plays a game and react to players' choices, in his Game Developers Conference speech on Friday morning.

Levine said that his former studio Irrational Games, which recently shut down following the completion of BioShock Infinite, was devoted to creating linear stories. But, he said, a single story that contained so many opportunities to spoil players if they found out any of its secrets was a "very stressful" thing to maintain: "I don't think we ever enjoyed the process of keeping secrets," he said.

Having to closely guard your game's secrets doesn't allow for a connection with one's audience, he said, since you can't do an open alpha, for example, allowing players to try out your game before it's ready.

To "do something different" and "go back to the drawing board," Levine said, he needed "time to fail." He had to be able to experiment with new ideas without "150 people looking at you going, dude, what am I supposed to be doing today?"

With a new small team of designers at publisher Take-Two, Levine will now be working on games that have systems that allow a non-linear, dynamic storyline that changes for every player, every time the game is played.

It's not about a Mass Effect style game with a few branching storylines, he said -- not about a game with X number of stories, but "X to the Y" number of stories.

Levine stressed that he is taking a walk-before-you-run approach -- they won't try to create a game with a story that is as complicated as BioShock's but also dynamically changes in response to your actions, but instead start off with trying to "model a set of limited and believable and impactful things."

How it might work, he said, is that a game might have several different "stars" -- non-player characters that each have a list of passions, things they want to accomplish in life. As the player does things that helps or hurts those passions, they'll start to like or dislike the player more.

As these passion bars go up or down, they will start affecting larger "macro-passion" bars that control bigger aspects of the story. These, Levine said, would be the professionally written and scripted major elements of the story, but might not appear for all players and all iterations of the game.

What Levine hopes this can create is scenarios where the players like certain characters more, want to spend more time with them, but end up screwing those characters over because they see a gameplay advantage to being friends with characters they like less. But since there are multiple passions for each character, it might be possible to adroitly play both sides.

"Your ability to play off one another, your ability to keep people happy -- betraying friends they had, false friends, leading people on, betrayals, reconciliation… you could, if you do your job right, end up simulating something like this," he said, showing a slide of the characters from Game of Thrones.

If a game had cooperative multiplayer ("this is not a promise," he added), you could find yourself wanting to ally with the computer-controlled factions in the world versus your real-life friends.

Levine said that he wants these passions of each character and the relationships they have with you to be as transparent as possible. He wants players to be able to see, understand and consciously know what they are doing when they take certain actions that will have an effect on the world.