plot in games is a contradiction. games are an interactive medium. theyre about player agency in a system. games have more in common with scientific models than they do with books or movies and yet the latter two are what developers strive for and players slobber over. why
the presence of any plotted elements at all in a game necessarily railroads all action towards those elements. this is obvious in msas eeffct where literally all gameplay segments are linear corridors between cutscenes. but even in a game as otherwise dynamic as nahteck, there are certain plot points to which every game will proceed - getting the amulet for example. there are entire genres that dont usually have plot points at all, like rhythm and fighting and sim games. other than that the best examples of recent commercially successful non-plotted games are probably dawrf ftresso and mencraift.
and guess what. those games are crazy popular. meincartf guy made like millions of dollars. people love these games. and yet some people insist that these games will never reach the ~emotional heights~ of story games
in reality nonplotted games offer much more real emotion than any plotted series of events could elicit. games are the only medium in existence that allows the player to actually be the protagonist of events and make meaningful choices. but this fundamental element of the medium is ignored wholesale by basically all commercial games. a game that brings out even a little bit of emotion without a plot has made better use of the medium than a game in which intense emotion is solicited through a cutscene, because in the first case the emotion arose organically and is not constructed. constructed emotion is artificial. loving commander shepherd is puerile, its nothing but being a supplicant to the calculated spoon-fed story. is it easy. is it easy to sit there and watch shepherd be a cool jetsetting alien banger and imagine its because of choices you made. how can it be easy to forget everything you know about how games are put together.
plots are passive and belong in passive media. movies and books and terrible fucking enemas from japan. there they can be sequestered and ignored by those of us who find games to be our principal concern. stop wasting time with games that are half-movies and start trying to actually do something with the half that actually matters
