Last week in the closing keynote of the Montreal Games Summit, Jonathan Blow said that games are fundamentally a sucky medium in which to tell a story.

He made a lot of compelling arguments supporting this. Roughly paraphrased:

- The storyteller isn’t in perfect control, especially when we try to give the player freedom, so we can’t use a lot of the narrative devices available to other media;

- Oftentimes the game’s rules actually go against the story’s meaning and direction, as there generally isn’t really any thought put into making them gel with each other in the first place. It wouldn’t be hard to change this, but you can never really tell how gameplay will be interpreted narratively by the player until it’s tested. And if it’s found that the rules don’t support story, this isn’t usually seen as a big enough problem to justify going back and change the game.

- Story needs to flow forward, and the challenges (to the player) inherent in a game keep preventing this from happening. To remedy this, some have reduced difficulty in their games (eg God of War), but this is cheating the medium, essentially turning it into a movie that you have to mash buttons to keep going.

The fact that the medium inherently keeps us from telling good stories is a conclusion I’ve reluctantly been inching towards, and Blow may have gotten me the rest of the way there. Of course the maturity level of the general gaming audience is a factor, but could we even tell a compelling story (integrated with gameplay so we’re not actually a movie intercut with play), if we wanted to?

I was expecting, after this conclusion of his, some sort of “so here’s how games should tell stories instead: “, but that’s not what came. He basically said that we shouldn’t try to tell stories; rather, a game’s meaning should be suggested in a much more implicit way, one that is derived almost osmotically by experiencing the work, like the meaning of a painting.

At first glance, this seems to me a tall order for an industry that isn’t known for its subtlety. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, we can’t even tell a compelling linear story when we try (even if the dialog of Mass Effect had been punched up, the story would still have sucked for a so-called story-driven game). Can we really be expected to do something even more challenging such as collectively producing a contemplative work of art?