Do It Until You Get It Right: Making the Player Succeed is a Detriment to a Game’s Story

THIS PIECE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR HALO: REACH THAT YOU WOULD HAVE PROBABLY ALREADY KNOWN FROM THE FIRST TEN SECONDS OF THE GAME BUT WHATEVER SPOILING WARNING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Despite some protestations to it, “video games” seems to have pretty well stuck as the term used to describe that thing that we all like to argue about on the Internet. Some say that calling the medium “video games” limits the sorts of experiences the medium encompasses. “Game” implies certain things that may not necessarily apply to all the things that we call video games. Does there have to be a challenge in a video game? Does there need to be a possibility of failure? Does there need to be a possibility of success? Is a certain level of competition, whether against other players or the game itself, required? Recently games like Proteus and Gone Home have raised these questions as they’re rather outside of mainstream game design. In most games, you do the thing the game tells you to do well enough until the game ends. And really, when you think about, is this not terribly limiting for a medium that is trying to establish itself as a legitimate way to tell stories? If a game requires success out of a player in order for them to experience the whole story, does this not limit, in a fundamental way, what that story can say and do?