Dear Esther: An interview

[Sexbad]

I don't know, story & story-telling is everything for me in games.

I'd like you to consider that what you may want is not really games, then. Stories can be very important, but without gameplay, that ruins the point, making it an entirely different medium. Calling Dear Esther a game is like calling a slideshow of all these awesome photos that I'm taking on my trip to Italy a film.

I think that if DE is successful, it shouldn't be marketed as a game, but rather as interactive fiction, because its popularity only makes people want more of the whole pretentious it-has-no-gameplay-but-is-still-a-great-game idea, and less of an expansion upon certain methods of storytelling that are specific to games.

That may have been hard to follow. It's almost midnight. Have another example of storytelling that can only be found in a video game: http://the-end-of-us.com/

Spoiler below!

The End of Us involves you playing (hint hint) with a companion, a character who only interacts with you through gameplay. It attempts to play with you, and how you play influences its actions. You build a relationship with it without saying a word, only through interacting with it. When you finally choose to either sacrifice blue comet (you) or red comet (it) at the end, you feel loss.

This is a story told in a way that no other medium can achieve because it uses its strength of interactivity to its advantage, rather than being an ironic hipster and completely sacrificing gameplay for story. You actually become friends with (or perhaps you begin to dislike) Comet because of this short game's interactivity.