To all you modders out there!

[Kman]

I've said this before and I'll say it again, but story driven games are capable of being 10 times more impactful than any gameplay driven game will ever be, and honestly I think they're what's going to start taking the forefront in the game industry in the future. Dear Esther was no where near perfect, but the ideas it pushed forward and boundaries it broke were impressive in its' own right. Before game like that started being developed gaming was a much simpler medium, pretty much the extent of what you could do with it was give an experience that would be fun and kill some time. But DE and other story driven games pushed the idea forward of using gaming as a medium of creating a more emotional and personal experience, one that could actually have a rather large impact on you.

The very concept of gaming in itself gives it way more potential in story telling than any other medium out there, such as movies, books, etc. It puts you in the world of the story itself, instead of basically watching the story unfold and characters develop you are one of the characters and you're placed right in the middle of the action. This allows for a much much more personal and realistic experience than any other type of media could ever provide, since you're actually in the story itself (this is where the whole concept of immersion comes into play).

When the first games started being developed it was acceptable for them to just be short fun experiences due to the fact that the medium was fairly new and the technology was far from being great, but now that it's existed for this long we are no longer bound by that and using games to create a much more personal and emotional experience is possible, and luckily a few developers have startsd to do that (TCR and FG being a few of them). And this whole idea of "gameplay is always first" is being passed down to new developers is incredibly ignorant and is what's keeping games from moving past being simple and fun ways to kill time.