You'll have to excuse me for the brutality of commenting like this in my first post. But I figure that someone who wants to be heard badly enough to post articles on sites shouldn't be afraid to hear other people, and *yes*, I am well aware of the hypocrisy.
So, for whom exactly is this article written? The game designers who are happily earning money? The average Joe customer who's happy with his storyless games? Or to likeminded individuals that are likely to visit the Escapist? I fail to see how anyone would change his mind. Plenty of people are happy with the way things are going and those who aren't... well, they're not doing much about it.
Don't get me wrong - I'm as dissatisfied with the state of the games industry as anyone, but I think venting on the Internet is not a solution. It's relieving, sure, but be aware that this isn't some storyteller's manifesto that'll change games even a tiny bit.
Some of the best art was made out of frustration. The Aeneid was written to teach those soft and corrupt Romans to be manly again. The Divine Comedy is one big piece of frustration about 14th century Florence and the papacy. Closer to home, Planescape Torment was created out of frustration with the lousy standard fantasy setting and overused gameplay concepts and World of Goo was made by EA employees who couldn't take working on EA's games anymore. So, and I do know I might be exaggerating here, why aren't you making something better? Yeah, gameplay and graphics will suffer, but World of Goo was made by only two guys and that even went out with the intention to sell, rather than some free indie game over the net that you could make.
Story just isn't going to sell. Maybe some people will have moderate successes with story-based games, but they're never going to be big, so stop trying. You saw it with Max Payne 2 - great story, never did too well. Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, featuring the most characterful characters you'll ever meet in a game killed Troika. Little wonder that the industry is what it is today. For the time being, I'm voicing my opinion with my wallet - no Gears of War coming through my door and the only Fallouts I have are the first two.
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Secondly, and more fitted to the topic at hand, I very much believe that you can't apply non-interactive storytelling techniques directly in a game. Taken out of context and put next to other media, even Bioshock or Portal are no Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. Games are actually pretty terrible at telling stories. What a lot of them do is cop out and have parts that aren't a game at all to tell the story; cutscenes.
Now what they do do very well is create worlds and immerse you. A character in a game can interact with you - that's powerful. You can wander through imaginitive worlds. That's why Half-life is considered great. Yeah, Gordon Freeman isn't much of a character, but that's by design, since he's you. Barney, Alyx, Dr. Kleiner or even Dog and Lamarr are memorable. What's more, nobody ever tells you you've landed in a dystopia run by dictatorial aliens. You *experience* it. You get one or two lines about Nova Prospekt - that it was a prison, but now it's something much worse - but that's nothing compared to walking around there and seeing the inhuman place.
As another example, Max Payne 2 - I do love that game myself too - which tells its story in multiple ways. Moreso than the cutscenes or graphic novels, though, I think the dreams are absolutely awesome and the best levels in video game history. You don't get to do much real gameplay like the rest of the game, but the environments are simply amazing. The twisted reality, combining the various locations and the Pink Bird mental institute, is very dreamlike in its absurdness and it conveys Max' mind better than any part of its touted graphic novel. That's what video games are powerful at. Its stories aren't told. They aren't shown. They're experienced.
(And in that sense, I dare think that Team Fortress does better storytelling (English language not being helpful here) than many a shooter that does have a plot.)
Edit: I'd also like to mention that STALKER was way more enjoyable before the plot got in the way and explained everything that was ever mysterious and interesting about the game.
