I greatly enjoyed this post, and it definitely joins the Codex Pantheon of best posts ever (perhaps alongside the PoE review by the same author, and grotsnik 's appropriately dyspeptic review of video games journalism). I offer some further thoughts given I also have an amateur interest in computer game storytelling.
Pseudo-books and pseudo-movies
If video games are art, they probably will need to do something different from other forms of creative expression: they won't be better movies than Citizen Kane nor better novels than Anna Karenina. Current RPGs are stuck either being interactive novels or interactive movies.
The distinguishing feature is whether there is a narrator : those that do are usually the 2D isometric RPGs and so have limited abilities for visual depiction, and so use text to fill it in. Later, as technology developed, you saw more and more 'cinematic' RPGs where the narrator vanished and instead game designers relied on their extremely labour intensive graphics and animation to do the job. Picking Bioware RPGs, you see the last vestiges of narration in KOTOR with the occasional '[you spent a fitful night of sleep before the podrace]': it vanishes in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age Series. So in these RPGs it seems a much closer analogy to film (theatre also a contender, but I imagine for most game designers have a lot more of their artistic diet in movies than in plays, and I think a lot of cutscenes ape tropes in cinema much more than theatre).
Although it's a trope on this forum to be against the new shit, I actually think this technological development is to be welcomed. Game dialogue is an infamously mixed bag, but I can think of a lot more examples of good dialogue than good description in videogames. Part of the issue might be the reward function for dialogue is a lot flatter: even a mediocre writer can produce saleable dialogue; even 'workmanlike' descriptive prose is challenging, and this offers limited advances on whatever 2D sprite you can dredge up from your graphics resources. PS:T, Fallout, and some bits of the Shadowrun series are exceptions, but even then unevenly. In the typical game studio (RPG or not), they generally have much stronger resources towards visual than textual storytelling (on which more later).
Choice and consequence as the 'value add' to video game stories
I don't think games need to have stories to be good entertainment, nor even to be art. I can appreciate the Samurai Jack scene in the OP without any understanding of the wider episode or series; I have never played or read anything about Guilty Gear, but the audio and visual looks stylish as hell despite my anti-anime prejudices. Perhaps the best example of a relatively 'plot light' video game of artistic merit is Shadow of the Colossus. I think one asset video games offer as medium is interactivity: in SotC, you can navigate around and probe the colossi and see them react, which is more than a static image - however well drawn - can provide.
Yet many computer games do use stories whilst trying to be art. I think the interactivity analogue that a video game with a story can offer is in the choice and consequence (of VD fame): you can not only see how things change but feel responsible for how the plot develops as it is driven (at least in part) by your choices. I think this can be better than the 'do I save X or Y' choose your own adventure nodes (on which more later), but even these, done well, can be effective at driving moral turmoil.
The necessary fraud of C&C
C&C isn't the only way a videogame can have a good story: looking glass games like Thief and (especially) System Shock 2 provide counter-examples. But it is a major weapon, especially in RPGs. I suggest that in C&C is in almost all cases somewhat fraudulent, and the degree to which this is finessed is key to success - so far, very few have managed it.
In real life, worldlines branch extraordinarily rapidly and seldom converge. I don't live a life of a fantasy protagonist, but I'm a twenty-something considering whether to keep my current job or take a new one: we can imagine the subsequent 'gameplay' would be very different depending on this choice: what environment I am in, which characteris I interact with, what tasks I do, and so forth. There would be some common elements between the branches (family, maybe I'd still visit the 'other' city on occasion), but they are mostly dissimilar. Each may give rise to subsequent choices and further branching. This occurs even in a micro level: in conversation, what others say to us is highly sensitive on what we say to them - not just in tone but in topics, subject, subsequent conversations, and so forth.
I think similar things would apply to the typical heroic protagonist deciding the fate of the world and so forth. Yet in virtually all cases this is not respected: in most games if you pick one faction or another you still end up with eerily similar sort of objectives on the same level; even if designers don't resort to the Bioware habit of having NPCs say exactly the same lines of dialogue no matter what you pick, the structure of the conversation is basically set in stone, and so forth.
I don't think this is avoidable, as verisimilitude here would imply a vast game on which a typical playthrough would only reveal a few percent of the content - economically suicidal. Thus designers have to get creative in avoiding these limits: obfuscating from the player how these choices end up converging onto a similar worldline, or carefully triaging which 'big choices' are going to have an impact on the gameworld going forward, and so forth. The proliferation of ending slides, although regretted in the OP, I therefore understand as a useful means of 'fire and forget' C&C, precisely because it avoids you having to code several versions of the same event the player to experience later (I agree with Darth Roxor that if you are going to do this you need to show the craft of a plausible reason why the consequences only emerge post-credits).
The dissociation of C&C from gameplay in cRPGs
I think a common fault in cRPGs is that the 'C&C' comprises a series of choose your own adventure nodes which could be dissociated from the gameplay. The narrative in a game like Mass Effect doesn't feed off the gameplay in any meaningful sense - you would lose nothing from the story if you replaced the cover shooting interludes between the dialogue wheel segments with cutscene or nothing at all.
There remains a tension between the 'gamey' elements of a computer game and pretensions towards art, but there are better examples, albeit most of the ones I think of aren't really RPGs:
In the ideal, game play and narrative would feed off one another; in practice, compromises tend to be made by both with little mutual benefit. I wholly understand the cynicism of many on this forum to RPGs with a big story emphasis. There's nothing wrong with a game like IWD: a dungeon crawler with nice visual design which mainly focuses upon encounter and dungeon design, with a wisp of a plot to move between the interesting levels. There's a lot wrong with the typical modern bioware RPG, which amounts to a sub par 2 hour movie distributed across 30-40 hours of mediocre gameplay.
The kids of today
The genre of 'what's wrong which the kids nowadays?' has an august history stretching back to Epicurius, so I'm sceptical in blaming the often hacky writing coming from video game studios as symptomatic of societal or aesthetic decline (although I enjoyed the previous pages in this thread on this). I think such accounts are challenged by the disparate performance of different creative fields and the hard to avoid Whig history of the last two centuries (where life expectancy doubled, child mortality more than halved, and everyone got several times wealthier). I agree modern computer games in the main weakly written, and the best examples (e.g. PST, Arcanum, FO, DX) are now approaching two decades old despite an accelerating release schedule. Yet most cultural commentators would argue we're in the midst of a golden age of other things, most notably the TV serial. I'm confident work like the Wire or the Sopranos or the West Wing is much superior to what was being churned out in the 80s.
What I think is going on is simply a matter of selection. In the 19th Century, if you were a top writing talent (and I think it is principally a matter of talent rather than teaching - I imagine 'great writers' are probably those with 1 in 100000 innate abilities, no matter the ministrations of creative writing majors and MFAs), your best bet likely being a novellist; nowadays, it probably is writing screenplays for TV or film - and good effing luck if you thought you could make your living as a poet or playwright. Video game writing remains fairly poorly paid and with little artistic validation. It is no surprise it does not attract top talent. This will likely improve in time: Eidos Montreal have a 'narrative director' in their Deus Ex games, and although these are not perfect, the writing in these games does show admirable craft and cleverness.
Yet I agree their are systemic issues beyond a lack of human capital, chief among them their predictable kowtowing is to current day political norms. I would guess the writers of Alpha Centauri are liberal, and on the face of it their cast of faction leaders ticks off the list of 90s liberal american prejudices: Religious Fundy, Amoral Chinese hive master, immoral big businessman, Russian uber-scientist, etc. etc. Yet what is key is they are charitable enough to both argue well for these characters and muddy the waters for more sympathetic ones: the liberal hippy is described using worms that eat brains as a weapon of war against her foes, Miriam argues passionately against the dehumanizing and authoritarian abuse of technology, and so on.
Contrast to modern AAA releases. My eyes rolled out of my skull when I discovered the veritable platter of sexual diversity in Dragon Age: Inquisition. There's the witty gay mage, with oh-so-subtle commentary in his backstory of being estranged from his father due to his attempts at fantasy conversion therapy; there's the FtM transexual, complete with dialogue options where he lectures you he isn't 'passing as anything', with the Qunari NPC explaining (even in) the ultra authoritarian Qun, they're totes cool win non-gender-conforming people; the Qunari PC himself is a pansexual into sexual dominance complete with safewords etc. if you're up for it - although he reassures that submitting to him would have no effect on how he'd respect you in your non-bedroom role etc.
My ire about this isn't because I hate liberal sexual mores around homosexuality, transsexuality, or BDSM. Nor is that a fantasy computer game couldn't be a good foil for saying some interesting things about human sexuality. Yet just transcribing the former into the latter accomplishes nothing of value: it isn't an interesting element of the setting ("there may be dragons, elves, magic, no obvious contraception, but it turns out these people think about sex just like I do - and you should!"); it doesn't add anything interesting to the characterisation - wouldn't it be more interesting (and challenging to the 'readers') if a character like Dorian wondered whether he should have undergone the conversion therapy for the good of Tevinter, or have a generally sympathetic character who nonetheless has some very unsympathetic views by modern sensibilities?
It also, obviously, isn't penetrating social commentary on the present day. Archetypal high fantasy has a natural affinity for conservatism: there's the sense of just hereditary rule, the 'true king', generally sanguine approaches to nobility and peasantry, at least one civilisation of ancient greats who have declined in the current age, and the good ending tends to be returning things to the 'good old days'. It has a multitude of open goals for a writer no matter polemically liberal to subvert in an interesting way. Instead, the theme is used as a set of costumes and props for a bunch of characters transposed from the current day, liberal enlightened attitudes and all. Even if one refrains from the opportunity for introspective challenge of prevailing norms, one hopes we can start beating up ideas we already dislike more artfully.
Pseudo-books and pseudo-movies
If video games are art, they probably will need to do something different from other forms of creative expression: they won't be better movies than Citizen Kane nor better novels than Anna Karenina. Current RPGs are stuck either being interactive novels or interactive movies.
The distinguishing feature is whether there is a narrator : those that do are usually the 2D isometric RPGs and so have limited abilities for visual depiction, and so use text to fill it in. Later, as technology developed, you saw more and more 'cinematic' RPGs where the narrator vanished and instead game designers relied on their extremely labour intensive graphics and animation to do the job. Picking Bioware RPGs, you see the last vestiges of narration in KOTOR with the occasional '[you spent a fitful night of sleep before the podrace]': it vanishes in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age Series. So in these RPGs it seems a much closer analogy to film (theatre also a contender, but I imagine for most game designers have a lot more of their artistic diet in movies than in plays, and I think a lot of cutscenes ape tropes in cinema much more than theatre).
Although it's a trope on this forum to be against the new shit, I actually think this technological development is to be welcomed. Game dialogue is an infamously mixed bag, but I can think of a lot more examples of good dialogue than good description in videogames. Part of the issue might be the reward function for dialogue is a lot flatter: even a mediocre writer can produce saleable dialogue; even 'workmanlike' descriptive prose is challenging, and this offers limited advances on whatever 2D sprite you can dredge up from your graphics resources. PS:T, Fallout, and some bits of the Shadowrun series are exceptions, but even then unevenly. In the typical game studio (RPG or not), they generally have much stronger resources towards visual than textual storytelling (on which more later).
Choice and consequence as the 'value add' to video game stories
I don't think games need to have stories to be good entertainment, nor even to be art. I can appreciate the Samurai Jack scene in the OP without any understanding of the wider episode or series; I have never played or read anything about Guilty Gear, but the audio and visual looks stylish as hell despite my anti-anime prejudices. Perhaps the best example of a relatively 'plot light' video game of artistic merit is Shadow of the Colossus. I think one asset video games offer as medium is interactivity: in SotC, you can navigate around and probe the colossi and see them react, which is more than a static image - however well drawn - can provide.
Yet many computer games do use stories whilst trying to be art. I think the interactivity analogue that a video game with a story can offer is in the choice and consequence (of VD fame): you can not only see how things change but feel responsible for how the plot develops as it is driven (at least in part) by your choices. I think this can be better than the 'do I save X or Y' choose your own adventure nodes (on which more later), but even these, done well, can be effective at driving moral turmoil.
The necessary fraud of C&C
C&C isn't the only way a videogame can have a good story: looking glass games like Thief and (especially) System Shock 2 provide counter-examples. But it is a major weapon, especially in RPGs. I suggest that in C&C is in almost all cases somewhat fraudulent, and the degree to which this is finessed is key to success - so far, very few have managed it.
In real life, worldlines branch extraordinarily rapidly and seldom converge. I don't live a life of a fantasy protagonist, but I'm a twenty-something considering whether to keep my current job or take a new one: we can imagine the subsequent 'gameplay' would be very different depending on this choice: what environment I am in, which characteris I interact with, what tasks I do, and so forth. There would be some common elements between the branches (family, maybe I'd still visit the 'other' city on occasion), but they are mostly dissimilar. Each may give rise to subsequent choices and further branching. This occurs even in a micro level: in conversation, what others say to us is highly sensitive on what we say to them - not just in tone but in topics, subject, subsequent conversations, and so forth.
I think similar things would apply to the typical heroic protagonist deciding the fate of the world and so forth. Yet in virtually all cases this is not respected: in most games if you pick one faction or another you still end up with eerily similar sort of objectives on the same level; even if designers don't resort to the Bioware habit of having NPCs say exactly the same lines of dialogue no matter what you pick, the structure of the conversation is basically set in stone, and so forth.
I don't think this is avoidable, as verisimilitude here would imply a vast game on which a typical playthrough would only reveal a few percent of the content - economically suicidal. Thus designers have to get creative in avoiding these limits: obfuscating from the player how these choices end up converging onto a similar worldline, or carefully triaging which 'big choices' are going to have an impact on the gameworld going forward, and so forth. The proliferation of ending slides, although regretted in the OP, I therefore understand as a useful means of 'fire and forget' C&C, precisely because it avoids you having to code several versions of the same event the player to experience later (I agree with Darth Roxor that if you are going to do this you need to show the craft of a plausible reason why the consequences only emerge post-credits).
The dissociation of C&C from gameplay in cRPGs
I think a common fault in cRPGs is that the 'C&C' comprises a series of choose your own adventure nodes which could be dissociated from the gameplay. The narrative in a game like Mass Effect doesn't feed off the gameplay in any meaningful sense - you would lose nothing from the story if you replaced the cover shooting interludes between the dialogue wheel segments with cutscene or nothing at all.
There remains a tension between the 'gamey' elements of a computer game and pretensions towards art, but there are better examples, albeit most of the ones I think of aren't really RPGs:
- Alpha Centauri is perhaps the greatest game of all time. One of the reasons for this is the artistry and craft in the underlying backstory. Generally delivered by short passages (for tech advances) or short films (secret projects). These gently heinlein the underlying logic of the narrative and are extraordinarily clever and well-written. Even better they go alongside the core gameplay: among many examples, the later tech advances does depict the accelerando towards the singularity and crisis whilst (in game) you are developing all sorts of game-breaking advances.
- DX: Invisible War had many faults, but one of its strengths was how organically the tasks and choices merged with the main narrative (also a feature in the later sequels). My favourite example is that if you don't play nice with the Illuminati, Chad Dumier orders his goon to take one of your friends (also his employee) hostage to secure your good behaviour. You can acquiesce to his threat, ignore it run the risk of him killing her or (as I did), hunt down where they were holding my friend, neutralise his troops, and rescue her. As a reviewer said at the time: 'they weren't pissed off with the game, they were pissed off in it'.
- The (cut, but restored) ending to KOTOR2, where you can trade stats off your main character to save NPCs.
In the ideal, game play and narrative would feed off one another; in practice, compromises tend to be made by both with little mutual benefit. I wholly understand the cynicism of many on this forum to RPGs with a big story emphasis. There's nothing wrong with a game like IWD: a dungeon crawler with nice visual design which mainly focuses upon encounter and dungeon design, with a wisp of a plot to move between the interesting levels. There's a lot wrong with the typical modern bioware RPG, which amounts to a sub par 2 hour movie distributed across 30-40 hours of mediocre gameplay.
The kids of today
The genre of 'what's wrong which the kids nowadays?' has an august history stretching back to Epicurius, so I'm sceptical in blaming the often hacky writing coming from video game studios as symptomatic of societal or aesthetic decline (although I enjoyed the previous pages in this thread on this). I think such accounts are challenged by the disparate performance of different creative fields and the hard to avoid Whig history of the last two centuries (where life expectancy doubled, child mortality more than halved, and everyone got several times wealthier). I agree modern computer games in the main weakly written, and the best examples (e.g. PST, Arcanum, FO, DX) are now approaching two decades old despite an accelerating release schedule. Yet most cultural commentators would argue we're in the midst of a golden age of other things, most notably the TV serial. I'm confident work like the Wire or the Sopranos or the West Wing is much superior to what was being churned out in the 80s.
What I think is going on is simply a matter of selection. In the 19th Century, if you were a top writing talent (and I think it is principally a matter of talent rather than teaching - I imagine 'great writers' are probably those with 1 in 100000 innate abilities, no matter the ministrations of creative writing majors and MFAs), your best bet likely being a novellist; nowadays, it probably is writing screenplays for TV or film - and good effing luck if you thought you could make your living as a poet or playwright. Video game writing remains fairly poorly paid and with little artistic validation. It is no surprise it does not attract top talent. This will likely improve in time: Eidos Montreal have a 'narrative director' in their Deus Ex games, and although these are not perfect, the writing in these games does show admirable craft and cleverness.
Yet I agree their are systemic issues beyond a lack of human capital, chief among them their predictable kowtowing is to current day political norms. I would guess the writers of Alpha Centauri are liberal, and on the face of it their cast of faction leaders ticks off the list of 90s liberal american prejudices: Religious Fundy, Amoral Chinese hive master, immoral big businessman, Russian uber-scientist, etc. etc. Yet what is key is they are charitable enough to both argue well for these characters and muddy the waters for more sympathetic ones: the liberal hippy is described using worms that eat brains as a weapon of war against her foes, Miriam argues passionately against the dehumanizing and authoritarian abuse of technology, and so on.
Contrast to modern AAA releases. My eyes rolled out of my skull when I discovered the veritable platter of sexual diversity in Dragon Age: Inquisition. There's the witty gay mage, with oh-so-subtle commentary in his backstory of being estranged from his father due to his attempts at fantasy conversion therapy; there's the FtM transexual, complete with dialogue options where he lectures you he isn't 'passing as anything', with the Qunari NPC explaining (even in) the ultra authoritarian Qun, they're totes cool win non-gender-conforming people; the Qunari PC himself is a pansexual into sexual dominance complete with safewords etc. if you're up for it - although he reassures that submitting to him would have no effect on how he'd respect you in your non-bedroom role etc.
My ire about this isn't because I hate liberal sexual mores around homosexuality, transsexuality, or BDSM. Nor is that a fantasy computer game couldn't be a good foil for saying some interesting things about human sexuality. Yet just transcribing the former into the latter accomplishes nothing of value: it isn't an interesting element of the setting ("there may be dragons, elves, magic, no obvious contraception, but it turns out these people think about sex just like I do - and you should!"); it doesn't add anything interesting to the characterisation - wouldn't it be more interesting (and challenging to the 'readers') if a character like Dorian wondered whether he should have undergone the conversion therapy for the good of Tevinter, or have a generally sympathetic character who nonetheless has some very unsympathetic views by modern sensibilities?
It also, obviously, isn't penetrating social commentary on the present day. Archetypal high fantasy has a natural affinity for conservatism: there's the sense of just hereditary rule, the 'true king', generally sanguine approaches to nobility and peasantry, at least one civilisation of ancient greats who have declined in the current age, and the good ending tends to be returning things to the 'good old days'. It has a multitude of open goals for a writer no matter polemically liberal to subvert in an interesting way. Instead, the theme is used as a set of costumes and props for a bunch of characters transposed from the current day, liberal enlightened attitudes and all. Even if one refrains from the opportunity for introspective challenge of prevailing norms, one hopes we can start beating up ideas we already dislike more artfully.
