But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. Games’ obsession with story obscures more ambitious goals anyway.
That’s a problem to be ignored rather than solved. On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films. 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? And in What Remains of Edith Finch, a new game about a girl piecing together a family curse, narration is accomplished through artifacts discovered in an old house. In the 2007 game BioShock, recorded messages in an elaborate, Art Deco environment provide context for a story of a utopia’s fall. In Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, for example, dioramas summarize the plot and setting of the film. Think of it as the novel wresting the real-time, first-person, 3-D graphics engine from the hands of the shooter game. Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself. One shortcut is an approach called environmental storytelling. It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones. 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. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot.
A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck.
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