It is worth pointing out that while the story of The Longest Journey is indeed great, the puzzle aspect contains something of the most egregious examples of poor logic in the history of videogames. It also doesn’t anything in the same manner of a new style of story telling as Bioshock, but is an excellent example of mature writing in games. But Manuel’s retrospective tells you all that better than I could.

Regarding funding smaller, artier films; isn’t that pretty much what EA did last year with Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space? What I find quite interesting is that whereas indie film-makers make films with lovely, unusual storylines and cinematography, indie game-developers make games with lovely, unusual game mechanics and graphics. I can’t think of very many first-rate indie games which focus on the story.

The original is the better, in my opinion, although the follow-up certainly had its charm as well. The universe crafted in the first game still holds up now though, and especially dialogue etc. Superb.

Indeed, one of the first things I wrote on my old pre-7outof10 blog was this: http://www.7outof10.co.uk/the-longest-journey-retrospective/02/05/2009/

Couldn’t agree with you more about the financial viability of exercises in storytelling but at least in cinema you do find that the studios do (to a limited degree, admittedly) fund smaller artier films with the revenues they’ve pulled in with blockbusters.

…I’m off to Steam to have a look at Longest Journey and Planescape.

Ignoring the argument about procedural story-telling, I think that in the same way that you can see a video as a book with added pictures, games are in part video with added interactivity. Each of these steps changes what you can do and show with the story, but it doesn’t change the actual process of telling a story.

And to an extent I think that a story with the depth of Fight Club has already been told in games. Planescape: Torment is the tale of a man following his own footsteps as the game shows us examples of “What can change the nature of a man”. Significantly it’s told without voice-acting, with 100,000 lines of text it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. But the depth and subtlety of your interaction with the world can be remarkable. Another example is The Longest Journey, which finally so undercuts all your expectations as to still be worth playing now.

I think the answer as to why aren’t all games showing the same depth of story-telling as Planescape is the same answer as to why all films aren’t, too take a more recent example, Moon: Because it doesn’t sell.