If video games are their own independent medium, and in many ways an art form, why do they subscribe to the conventional storytelling of other mediums such as movies and books?

The answer to the question is quite simple, but introduces a slew of new questions that are far from it. The answer of course being that the video game industry is still very young and we just don't know any better way of doing things. This leaves us wondering, how does one break the mold and tell a story in a truly unique way that could only be done through a video game? This is territory that is often discussed, but rarely ventured into. How would you guys go about breaking the conventional mold? I'm not talking small changes, I'm talking a complete overhaul of how we think about storytelling. Definitely something interesting to consider, as it would change the game industry forever.

I think many devs try to do this, but in part it's that we're currently at a place where the stories that we WANT to tell are a much larger set than the ones that we're currently good at telling in a "gamely" way. I don't think there's going to be a magical insight that changes this overnight; it's just a matter of the slow development of the craft.

If you look at a lot of classic games before... oh, 1990 or so, the ambitions of their stories were often a pretty good match for what they could evoke through gameplay alone. "Kill a bad guy", "rescue a princess", "go on a journey". You often didn't have the resources (disk space, processor power, development resources) to do a whole lot more than that. Those aren't bad stories -- those are classic human stories -- but they're pretty simple stories. Gameplay and narrative start to diverge more after 1990, when the complexity and novelty of stories that devs were trying to tell started to regularly exceed those that could be straightforwardly told through gameplay -- at that point, "rescue a princess" was getting pretty old! Clicking through a lot of text, or watching cutscenes, started to become a lot more common regardless of genre.

There were still exceptions to this, though. Super Metroid tells a story that's more complicated than, say, Metroid, but still does so largely through gameplay and level design. It's not a *complicated* story if you compare it to its more cinematic contemporaries (say, Final Fantasy VI), but it also shows that you can effectively tell stories of Faustian bargains in the past that still haunt the present. (That's a relatively easy story to tell through environmental design alone, which is why it's still ubiquitous in games to this day.)

Anyway, every year or so I see a story that is told largely through "gamely" means and that I've never seen before. This isn't a transformative change, because each one adds only one or two techniques to our vocabulary, and it takes some time for them to work their way into general parlance. But we'll probably get there eventually.

This is a question I like!

First of all I'm going to agree with Sunandshadow that a crucial ingredient is that the story/narrative is not something that someone tells, but rather that you experience. An important ingredient is that the more meaning you assign to the events of the story, the more impact it has on you and therefore the stronger the story is. I almost feel that we need to rename "storytelling" to "story-experiencing" in order to better address this subject.

Ok, so translating this to games I propose the following types of story-experiencing in games:

1. -> Games can tell stories the classical way by presenting a narrative and having the interaction (gamey bits) be separate from the narrative. Take JRPGs as an example: here (in a lot of cases) the meaningful events (the story) are outside of the control of the player. So the player will experience the narrative in roughly the same way as a book or a movie. In effect the story and the game are separate things. The game may re-enforce the storytelling during the gamey-bits through its tone or through its mechanics, but the playing of the player cannot influence the story that is told.

Don't get me wrong, there is some progressive stuff to be found here. Take "Lonelines", this is a good example of mechanics alone that convey a story. But still I would argue that here the story itself is firmly in the hands of the game and that the player only gets to receive it.


2. -> Games can also tell stories in a way as to allow the players to have some control over the narrative. The player can make a few key choices (be good or be evil is a popular one). And this usually increases the meaning the player assigns to the events that follow those choices if the game does it right. The problem in expanding the amount of choise a player has, is that it is very hard and expensive for a game to have multiple endings that are all consistent and plausible. From a cost perspective the developers will want to re-use enemies, scene's and backdrops so they usually don't like to have vastly different stories in a single game.

Mass Effect is good representative of this kind of storytelling. You get to make a lot of small choices (besided the good/evil thing) and the game does its best to enforce the consequences of those small choises. This increase their meaning and enhances the story-value of your actions.


3. -> A third kind of stories takes place in games is where the game allows the player to construct its own story. Take Minecraft where the player only has a vague goal. The randomly generated terrain will ensure that each playthrough is different, and forces the player to come up with new decisions on what to do and how to achieve this. Those decisions have meaning as they are the player's. The game just set the stage for the story. This is effectively role playing the sense that the player will (usually) not go for a 100% optimal strategy. By allowing to accomodate other wishes (make a better house, don't slaughter all the cute animals, ...) the player is shaping the sequence of events and thereby creating its own story.

But even if the player is not roleplaying in the sense that the player goes for 100% efficiency, the unfolding of events can still have great meaning to the player. This is usually the case if the player knows that the game was not scripted for these event but that they are personal, unique to this playthrough. This is the case with many roguelikes, but also with other games that have permadeath and random terrain.

As a side note: the great thing about this third kind of stories is that there is value in retelling them (as more regular stories) to other people.

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My personal favourite story moment in games is still how to evolve your Jedi in Knights of the Old Republic. (Huge spoiler) you will need to decide how to react to the discovery that you have been betrayed. From a storytelling perspective it is very good that the game has no real meaning about what you choose to do. This seems contradictory, but it breaks from the mold of second kind of storytelling and allows you to fully roleplay. Since the event itself is so shocking (at least the first time) you assign enough meaning to it without needing the game to re-enforce it.

So, as to answer the OP question: (how to) tell a story in a truly unique way? I would say that a mix between the second and the third type of game stories would probably be where the future lies for innovation in computer narratives.

Building on what's been said above, the difference in story-telling in Video Games, compared to other formats is the interactivity. Blend the interactivity with the story you want to tell, and you'll have story-telling in a video-game(this, in a very crude way of course). Conventional story-telling in video games, although it's possible, is not exactly something that should be expected. What I mean is, Video Games have the possibility of going beyond what is expected or conventional and when this is well done, it lets Video Games make a name for themselves, as well as it as a medium.

It's been said above that the industry is still very young, and that may be a reason to why the mold hasn't been completely broken yet, along with reasoning within lack of resources, but along with that, I personally think it's because the Game Industry has so much potential, and by knowing this Game Developers can sometimes be reluctant to experiment and end up screwing up - Something which I think is non-existent when trying new things out. The main reasoning behind this I'd say is because the Video Games Industry isn't just an art form anymore, it's a business. And if anyone is going to break the mold, and introduce something completely different, it might just be Indie Developers.

As time passes, as the world and tech evolve, so do Video Games - sorry- so SHOULD Video Games. I love classic and retro video-games, still play them nowadays, but as things evolve we get many more opportunities and resources to bring what we envision to existence.

When we experience a story, we expect to be able to take something from it. We expect to have a sort of epiphany(major or minor) on top of the overall experience. The common keyword among everything to do with story-telling in Video Games however, should be CHOICE. When I have to make moral choices, it brings me a sense of urgency, even knowing it's all just a simulation - But that's just it, a simulation. One of the reasons we like story-telling in Video Games is because even though it's a simulation we still relate to it on so many levels, usually emotionally too.

What is "Story-telling in Video-Game form"?
I think we can't exactly answer that one just yet, precisely because Video Games haven't found the balance between the things it excels at, as an art form, Interactivity - Experimentation(take into account we can pretty much create ANYTHING that we can think of).