Why games fail at storytelling

[Millennium]

Games fail at storytelling because they're trying to tell the wrong kinds of stories.

No, really; that's pretty much it. Games are great for telling stories when you take advantage of the things that make games what they are, while not trying to shoehorn in things which highlight what games are not. But when you try to make a game into just another movie, it fails. This is why licensed games tend to fail so badly: they're trying to shoehorn movie plots into games, and this cannot work.

I swear, game companies would make far better story-based games if they sat the dev teams down for mandatory tabletop role-play sessions every week. Strip away the graphics, the complex physics calculations, and even controls as we know them: leave nothing but the pure interactive fiction and a bare set of mechanics that humans can calculate out on the fly. Put people in corresponding roles: developers homebrew the game mechanics, concept designers and scripters write the adventure together, the director GMs, and everyone plays. Then send them back to their desks, keeping what they learned from these sessions in mind, and watch the quality of gaming skyrocket.