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Hmm I'm not convinced by the people arguing games are stories, but playing live on twitch so other people can watch might be a new medium. To me story consumption is fundamentally passive, vicarious identification. If you have to make decisions it's not a story.
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I wonder if this is big enough to be considered mainstream... any signs besides raw numbers that watching others play games is now a zeitgeist-shaping force?
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To avoid pointless semantic arguments that are really about claiming the word "story," happy to restrict to "passive, vicarious spectatorial stories"
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I think this is an is/has confusion. Videogames are not stories, but they have stories, and in having stories provide an interesting medium for conveying them, even if that's not all that they are.
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That's a very questionable distinction if one is thinking about stories. You're imposing commodification categories on a continuum between creation and consumption.
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It is empirically false that no one plays video games for the story; many people play no other part of them. And in many cases there are no meaningful decisions in that story, either. Also there was a book genre "choose your own adventure", which was clearly story.
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Most games w/big narrative component don’t let you fundamentally alter the story. You might have a choice of intermediate goals at diff stages, & you can succeed or fail at each. But the major beats happen in a set order. Everyone who “wins” has generally been told the same story
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