Why I Think Story Is the Point

People who do not play narrative games often ask what the appeal is. They assume it must be about the gameplay mechanics, the graphics, or some competitive element they are missing. When I try to explain that I am playing a game largely to find out what happens to a character — that I stopped for an hour at a particular scene because the writing made me feel something unexpected — they usually look at me the way people look when they suspect you are describing a very elaborate way of watching television. I want to make a case for narrative games as a distinct and serious art form, and for story as the element that makes them worth defending in the first place.

What Narrative Games Can Do That Film Cannot

The most obvious difference between a game and a film is agency. When you make a choice in a narrative game, the story responds to you. This creates a fundamentally different relationship to the events on screen. In a film, you watch a character make a decision and feel whatever you feel about it. In a game, you make the decision, and then you live with what it produces. This changes the nature of moral engagement. A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on moral decision-making in interactive versus passive media found that players in narrative games who made choices that violated their stated moral values showed stronger negative emotional responses than viewers who observed the same choices made by fictional characters. The researchers described this as "transportation with consequences" — narrative immersion combined with personal accountability. The medium creates a form of empathy that is harder to hold at arm's length.

The Games That Changed My Thinking

I want to be specific, because I think specificity matters here. Disco Elysium constructed one of the most sophisticated literary depictions of failure, addiction, and political grief I have encountered in any medium. The writing is exceptional, but the writing is also inseparable from the interactivity — the way your choices reveal character, the way your protagonist's broken internal voices argue with each other about what he believes. You cannot separate the story from the form. What Remains of Edith Finch told stories about loss and family mythology in eleven minutes of gameplay that I have thought about for years. The game mechanics of each vignette were designed to mirror the emotional content of the story they were telling. That is craft. That is intentional use of the medium's properties in service of meaning.

The Tangent About What "Serious" Art Means

There is a critical establishment problem here that is worth naming. The gatekeeping of what counts as serious art has historically tracked closely with what wealthy older men in major cultural capitals chose to evaluate. Film was not serious for decades. Comics were not serious for decades. Each time a new medium produces work of genuine depth, the response is a lag period of dismissal followed by eventual admission. Games are in that lag period. The dismissal is not based on engagement with the actual work. It is based on aesthetics of respectability.

Why Story Matters More Than Technical Achievement

When players in surveys are asked what they remember years after completing a game, they describe characters and choices and emotional moments far more often than graphical fidelity or mechanical systems. A study from the University of York on player memory and game experience found that narrative elements were the most reliably recalled aspects of gameplay experiences across all genres and time periods since completion. Players remembered how a game made them feel. They remembered what happened to the people they spent time with. This is why I will always care more about story than graphics. Graphics age. Story does not. I played a fifteen-year-old game last year and felt something real. The visuals were technically dated. The characters and their choices were not.

What I Want From the Medium

More writers treating games as the narrative form they are. More critics engaging with games the way they engage with novels — attending to prose, structure, theme, character, and the intentional use of formal properties. More players who play a game and then want to talk about what it meant, not just whether they completed it. The best narrative games I have played have expanded my understanding of what stories can do. That is the highest thing I can say about any medium. Story is not a feature of games. For the games that matter most to me, it is the entire point.