The relevant part of Citizen Kane to this isn’t just “it’s a good movie” but that it’s an example of how to tell a gripping story in a way that only a movie can. It didn’t just film a play, it used all the things that a movie can do to deliver its message. So pretend I said “ICO.” Or “Shadow of the Colossus.” Because both of those convey whatever mood or meaning they have via their gameplay, not via cutscenes or by telling you explicitly what they’re about.

“Games already have their Citizen Kane. It’s called Super Mario 64.”

Joe sez:

The eternal movie:games analogy is something I think a lot about as well, and it’s funny that I came to a similar conclusion, but I used a different game. For me, games have their Citizen Kane and it’s called “Chess”.

I think your analogy is tighter, as you address the specific reasons for Citizen Kane’s deserved position on the top of movie charts and draw a line between those reasons and the reasons for Super Mario 64’s greatness.

Indeed, my analogy is more of an exasperated retort against those insecure gaming enthusiasts (aka EA executives) who hand wring when faced with the Awesome Awesome that is Film.

Video games share the rich tradition of narrative with films, but films have fuck all when it comes to interactive play. For that love, you need games, of which the electronic variety are a member in full standing.

A lot of the current writing about game design (if not the actual process of game design) takes Sid Meier’s quote that “a game is a series of interesting choices” and runs with it. Games are about interactivity, interactivity means letting the audience choose what happens. At that point, you start talking about “probability spaces,” and everything else — story, setting, UI, music, etc. — is just about filling up that probability space with context and “information [that needs to be] conveyed to the player,” as you put it. The core choices are still the structure and purpose of the game.

My problem with that is the first assumption: that interactivity means choice. I think that’s true for a subset of games, but it’s not the definition for all games. I believe that agency is more fundamental to interactivity than choice is. I don’t care as much about “I chose this over that,” but “I did this.”

My reason is that that probability space is always going to be finite. The designer knows that, and the player knows that. As the player, I’m only going to see a subset of the choices anyway, so why do I care about the stuff I don’t choose? Being finite doesn’t mean that it’s shallow, because I’ve played more hours of SimCity and The Sims and Civ 3/4 probably than all other games combined. If you’re as clever as Meier and Wright are, you can get seemingly indefinite permutations from a finite set of inputs.

But it’s bad for storytelling, since stories generally favor depth over breadth and hate repetition. If you’re putting all your energy into making this huge “probability space,” then the result of each choice has to get more granular and shallow. While units in a strategy game or interactions in The Sims can be repeated several times before they get old, repeating plot developments or lines of dialogue in a story will only work so many times before they feel cliched and tedious. There’s a reason Choose Your Own Adventure books aren’t great literature.

So it sounds to me like you’ve made a circular argument: you’ve assumed that a game is a series of interesting choices, and storytelling in games exists only to provide context to or information for those choices, and therefore choices are important.

I’m assuming that a game is about giving me a goal and a toolset and letting me use those tools to reach that goal. In a solitaire card game, that goal is to fill the reserve stack. In a storytelling game, that goal is to complete the story. That doesn’t mean that choosing between different story branches wouldn’t be cool (I think it would, and am interested in seeing how we can make a genuinely compelling “choose your own adventure” story), just that it’s not necessary.

A videogame presents the user with a compelling choice that impacts their ability to make future choices.

Not exactly a definition of a videogame, because it’s not really video-specific. But the core is about the choice. That’s not to say that “choice is everything,” particularly in the way that you discuss it above. But games *are* primarily about user interaction. How do you inform a player where to go?

You can have a HUD element that shows them, you can explicitly say “go here,” or you can embed the information in part of a story and make the communication feel more natural. The degree to which a story is “required” in a game is dictated by how the designer wants the information conveyed to the player.

The degree to which that story is interactive, in this case, is largely irrelevant. If the choice that the player is presented with in the game is to change the story somehow, fine - it’s *likely* that to make that choice compelling, the story needs to react to the choice, it needs to give the user context for that choice, etc. But it’s not implicit in creating a story for a game.

What *is* necessary is that the story is relevant to the user’s actions.

So it all *does* come back to choice.