Video Games Are Better Without Stories

Highlights

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories
- players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.
It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones.
- Environmental Storytelling is a shortcut
  - Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?
  - Are they really stories, when they are really environments?
  - And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?
    - alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films
the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run.
"To dream of the Holodeck is to dream a complicated dream of the novel."
Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects.
"Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages."
the very concept of a Holodeck-aspirational interactive story implies that the player should be able to exert agency upon the dramatic arc of the plot.
Environmental storytelling offers a solution to this conundrum.
- Instead of trying to resolve the matter of simulated character and plot, the genre gives up on both, embracing scripted action instead. The player’s experience becomes that of a detective, piecing together narrative coherence from fragments conveniently left behind in the game’s physical environment.
As in Doom and BioShock and almost every other first-person game ever made, the emptiness of the environment becomes essential to its operation. 3-D games are settings as much as experiences—perhaps even more so.
What Remains of Edith Finch
- a series of a dozen or so narrative vignettes, in which Edith accesses prohibited parts of the unusual house, finally learning the individual fates of her forebears by means of the fragments they left behind—diaries, letters, recordings, and other mementos.
- aesthetically coherent, fusing the artistic sensibilities of Edward Gorey, Isabel Allende, and Wes Anderson. The writing is good, an uncommon accomplishment in a video game. On the whole, there is nothing to fault in What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a lovely little title with ambitions scaled to match their execution. Few will leave it unsatisfied.
- The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.
- invites players to abandon the dream of Interactive Storytelling
Think of a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations.
Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them.
- To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, but it’s also an unambitious one.
  - Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories.
  - games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects.
    - Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.
- As the only mass medium that arose after postmodernism, it’s no surprise that those materials so often would be the stuff of games themselves. More often than not, games are about the conventions of games and the materials of games—at least in part. Texas Hold ’em is a game made out of Poker. Candy Crush is a game made out of Bejeweled. Gone Home is a game made out of BioShock.
- Yes, sure, you can tell a story in a game. But what a lot of work that is, when it’s so much easier to watch television, or to read.
- A greater ambition, which the game accomplishes more effectively anyway:
  - to show the delightful curiosity that can be made when stories, games, comics, game engines, virtual environments—and anything else, for that matter—can be taken apart and put back together again unexpectedly.
- To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel.
- If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.

Thoughts

from D&D experience, I know that we can generate narratives from gaming
- possibly they're not good stories to anyone except the players involved

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