At first glance, it’s hard to believe that the art of storytelling, which has been around as long as people, could be subject to innovation, but over at his ClickZ column, Jeremy Lockhorn, an internet marketing strategist at Avenue A/Razorfish, makes a powerful point.

A few years back, I hypothesized that if you take interactive TV to the extreme, where the viewer is somehow empowered to control the storyline, you’d need a completely different skill set to tell a compelling story.

Making storytelling’s linear nature interactive requires a different kind of creativity. It’s at least partially why some offline agencies have trouble with online. So many have built their business around the :30 spot. It’s a very linear (and short) format, whereas online is mostly nonlinear and consumer-empowered.

It won’t be the master storytellers who will be the respected geniuses in this world, I hypothesized then. Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas — they’re all linear storytellers. Video game developers possess the right combination of skills and experience to succeed in this world.