The original poster is correct. All the excuses that have been made are things that can be addressed within conversion. Granted that you accept an allowance for subtration, alteration, and addition. Basically anything can be addressed in another medium through the tools of that medium. Games are no exception to this rule. Books can become movies, and movies can become books. Television series can even become graphic novels. The only limitation is the skill of the one that is conveying the story. So the story is totally seperate from the game. Anything the game can do is easily replicated in another medium.
This isn't even the classical argument that has some merit. For instance great books that become great movies. Basically a book isn't constrained by a time limit, and doesn't have to adhere to pacing. Thus someone can reasonably argue that there was no way Jurassic Park the movie could be as good as Jurassic Park the novel. By the way read the book the character Nedry isn't quite the asshole that the movie portrayed. Anyway the stories in games are much smaller, and so they exist at the other end of the spectrum. Basically they can be built up rather then stripped down.
What really proves the original poster correct is interchangability. No matter the game you could introduce a different story, and it would mesh with the game play. In other words both aspects of the game both play and story are truly independent of one another. You could drop any dark story into Alan Wake, and the game would still work. The story might not be as good, but it could be done. Your only complaint would be that the story of Alan Wake wasn't as good as you would have liked, or it could actually be better then you imagined.
Damn that Wicked witch of the west who kidnapped Alans mental sister, and demanded that he fight the shadow master to get to the magical type writer. Thankfully Alans older brother herman an avid deep sea diver is there to help him. If only Alan could remember what happened after the witch gave him that twisted acid. You see it can actually be done. Hell its probably been done before near the end of a project where the writing staff decided to do a rewrite, and none of you ever figured that out.
I read some talk of multiple choices in this thread, and it made me feel very said. The reason being that this isn't some new concept only relevant to games. This has been done in the literary sense. There have been books that have done this exact same thing, and frankly they have gone all the way. Some books had dozens of potential or even hundreds of potential outcomes due to the readers choice. Am I the only one that remembers reading these novels as a child. They were quite popular for a time. Not only do they predate the games, but there are more of them then there are games that do this multiple path layout.
Anyway yeah he is right games and their stories aren't so interwoven that you can't remove the story from the game. It isn't even as if you can't replace a games story with a different story. Sure it might seem a little convoluted, but you can do it. More to the point due to being tied with a game a story is always more convoluted. A game puts limits on story, and places a lot of surreal constraints on story. So we have all come to expect that a games story is going to be a little contrived.
