Restating My Beliefs: More On Games & Narrative

As I've said before, my views on games and narrative are always changing.  Once, I believed that games were games, and stories were just tacked onto them.  Then I began to see things differently - I began to realise that gameplay itself had a sort-of narrative embedded in it, and that marrying the two narratives could produce something magical, new and exciting.  Now, my beliefs have broken completely free of the confines of that argument, so I thought I'd go back over them one more time.

Tetris, believe it or not, was the title that first made me consider the potential for gameplay to form a narrative of a kind - for Tetris might well be the one great "tragic" narrative in gameplay, comparable in a way to Romeo & Juliet.  From the introduction that makes it clear this is a "tale of woe" (much like the way in which Tetris's bucket shows no way of completing the game) to the rising tension between the families, leading to the final demise of our couple, any individual's story in Tetris is analogous to the Shakespearian tragedy, despite each player's story being unique.

I've said before that the term "storytelling" doesn't apply to films OR games.  I've recently found a new way of explaining this; considering the point at which the story itself is born.   A story is, in its purest form, words that are spoken directly from one person to another - narrated, hence the term, narrative.  When a story is told directly, the point of the story's creation is clear - the words are being spoken from one person to another.  When watching a movie, however, we are left to interpret the images on-screen into a story by ourselves.  The point of story creation is once-removed from the author themselves, in that we are left to interpret what they are showing us into a story of our own.  Games, then, are the next logical step from this - a medium thrice removed from the author, where we are given an environment where we could potentially have a story, and we are left to first manipulate this environment in whatever way we see fit, and then to construct the story in our head from this.

The argument, as I see it, is not whether games are as credible a medium for stories as movies or books.  Games are a medium completely separate from any other, even more abstracted from its most direct predecessor, cinema, as that medium is from its predecessors.

To put it another way, I have been right all along, despite my viewpoint changing.  Games are not a storytelling medium as we know it, and stories we add to them are always tacked onto them.  Gameplay, however, can form something like a narrative of its own, and in this way we can see parallels between a gameplay experience and a story.  Until we can accept games as a truly independent medium from others, we are bound to limits in what we can achieve with them.