For the last week or so, Joystick Division has been having a pseudo-conversation about the value of story in video games. While I think most of us here put a fairly high value on what games have to say, it's relatively to consider storytelling so heavily. Nobody questioned the value of "the story" in Bad Dudes: ninjas kidnapped the president and he can only be rescued two dudes...that are bad. Even though some of the very earliest games were clearly an attempt at telling a story, any "story" to speak of was subservient to gameplay. Games are played, you play them as a game, you don't consume them as a reader of literature. But the development of more sophisticated fantasies, nuanced plots, structured narratives and other academic sounding words have challenged what a video game even is.

As stripping the term down might suggest, a video game is a game played on video. Take table tennis, put the paddles on a screen and you've got a video game. We can call it Pong. You can read the diametric separation of paddles as allegory for the uncompromising competition between feminine and masculine identities in the player but that argument falls apart very quickly (it's also liable to have you permanently uninvited to all future family events). Pong is just a game on video. That's all the term means. But Heavy Rain isn't just a game on video--in fact, as a game, there are significant shortcomings that make it not worth playing at all--Heavy Rain is a story told by a developer and a player. Pong and Heavy Rain are both called "video games" even though they really aren't the same thing at all.

Putting an epic storyline into Pong would be as pointless as it would be absurd, just as much as taking the story out of Heavy Rain would make it unapproachable. But even in the case of Heavy Rain, calling it a "game" means that the mechanics it operates on must, in some way, comply with the design of a game. A game has rules, it has conditions for victory and defeat. If there's any story at all, it must come after the conditions for a game are met. This leads to a false dichotomy between gameplay and story, where priority has always been given to the former--although less since the latter has permeated deeper into the medium. The more control story has over the experience--as in the case of Heavy Rain--the more likely audiences will be to question whether it should even be called a "game" at all.

I declared myself done with video games early on in my undergraduate education. As I saw it, I had spent enough hours of my life rabidly pursuing secret levels and alternate endings and mini-games that - I proclaimed grandly, to myself, in my head - amounted to prolonged digital masturbation. (I won't mention my senior year relapse during which I performed such tasks as essentially being Super Mario World TWICE in a week, due to an accidental file erase.) I travelled for a year right after I graduated, and didn't touch a controller for that entire time. I got philosophical about it -- "Oh, my former self who built a bunker of Link and Yoshi to blind himself from the anxiety-filled ambiguity of modern experience yadda yadda yadda." I convinced myself that listening to Radiohead B-sides while looking at some dry mountains in Chile was what I should actually be doing.

When I returned to the States, I moved to Los Angeles with two actor friends and steeped my days in a soul-crushing mix of menial office work and hours of solitary, misplaced TV writing at assorted Starbucks'. It was soon into this debacle that one of my friends acquired his brother's old Nintendo 64. Larry David was probably somewhere in my peripheral vision the first time we fired it up, and the smell of Stouffer's Dog-Food Lasagna was most likely seeping out from our microwave. All I know for sure is when I wrapped my hands around that triple-stalactite of a controller, my liberal-arts pretentions melted away. I remembered that I LOVED VIDEOGAMES. Simply, truly, deeply. Deliberate identity formation, be damned.

There are a number of ways RPGs can tell a story but for convenience's sake, we'll polarize them in a graduating scale with Elder Scrolls or Fallout style characters on one end and Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest on the other. Bethesda's RPGs feature a faceless set of eyes airdropped into a strange new world; in this world the player is free to wander and change the landscape and politics however they wish. The player and the protagonist are one, they share the same motivations and are driven by the same interests, they have the same knowledge and they are guided by the same morals. Opposite are the Square-Enix heroes that are fully written in a strict narrative. The player and the characters are separate entities experiencing a plot from very different perspective. No matter how convincing the cosplay, there is only one Cecil, and he is not the same person as the player that guides him.

The stealth game is something that often works much better in theory than in practice. The tense atmosphere and clever strategy can be dashed to the ground by a glitching spotlight or a guard's inability to see past fifteen feet. There are very few games that can thread that needle successfully. But one of the seldom acknowledged factors of a good stealth game is not just how players can avoid being seen, but how they can see everybody else.

There is a theory in film called voyeurism that--in a far too condensed a nutshell--suggests that there is a vaguely perverted pleasure in watching people that can't see us. Common knowledge says that people behave differently when alone than when they're among others, the sense of being watched changes what people say and do. It isn't often that we can see somebody before that change occurs. When somebody is caught off guard, and the opportunity to see another's private self emerges, even the most mundane and common behaviours carry an air of mystique and taboo.

There's a balance between being watched and watching. Being watched is uncomfortable, violating, fearful, and being able to instil those feelings on another gives one the upper hand. The sense of insecurity we get from seeing the lit office windows overlooking the test chambers in Portal would be equal to the sense of voyeuristic pleasure we would get if we were the ones behind them. A part of the fun of not being seen is lurking in on other people's daily lives, giving us a sense of who they are when nobody else is around. A stealth game hero can see every identical mook in a way that they're closest loved ones hardly ever catch them in. Stealth games carry an inherent fear of being seen. No matter how competent or elite the hero is supposed to be, in a stealth game the second they're spotted and the music rises, they're helpless. An endless battalion of uniformed goons will hunt players until they're dead or they disappear again. By necessity these games have us lurking in the background, where there's comfort in isolation and terror in exposure. What the best stealth games do, though, is turn this fear on the bad guys.

The Legend of Zelda has been around for 25 years. Nintendo's latest instalment in the venerable series proudly trumpets the milestone in the opening credits. There's even an in-game reference to the two-and-a-half decades in the series. In the ever changing medium of video games, 25 years is an eon. The Legend of Zelda series is more a genre of its own than a series. The latest Zelda game, however, has one key feature that sets it apart, Skyward Sword is the last Zelda game that can possibly work under the Ocarina of Time model.

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Zelda games have always had a mild allergy to change (most Nintendo franchises avoid breaking more than a few of their own conventions at every release) but as it stands now, the second a new instalment is announced it can be assumed that it will be set in Hyrule, fate has chosen a hero named Link and a spirit maiden named Zelda to combat their foil Ganon, Link will search for a series of relics that will break a seal and then search for a new set of relics after going through the seal, Zelda will be captured and in the final hour Link will confront Ganon in an underwhelming boss fight.

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Sidequests make good games great. Most solid games are playable to just about anyone, but to really pull a player in, to give them a chance to finish up and walk away and have them choose to play on and get more is the sign of a great game. It's already been written plenty elsewhere but the power of games lies in the close relationship between the audience and the work. If the audience can end a story but decides not to because of their intimacy with it than it speaks to the strength of the work. But sidequests can be fickle creatures and they seem more prone to making cumbersome distractions rather than added depth.