For proof, look at the saga of No Man's Sky. It's a game about exploring space, and when they debuted a trailer at E3, everyone lost their goddamn minds over it, as I did above, because of all that sweet, intoxicating freedom. The main hook was that there were nine quintillion planets to explore, and you could go anywhere and do anything. It seemed pretty damn neat. But then it came out, and everyone was so horribly disappointed that fans dubbed it "No Man's Lie," and demanded refunds (and in many cases, received them). What was the problem? Were there only two quintillion planets? Were all the planets the same? Did the game just straight up not work?

Hello Games
Was it this guy?

No, nothing like that. The problem was that multiplayer didn't work, and a lot of the aliens you met were kinda boring. The nine quintillion planets, the space travel, that was all there. In fact, No Man's Sky does absolutely everything it promised from the beginning; everything that made us excited to play it in the first place. It's just that exploring an infinite video game universe -- the very thing that we got so excited about in the first place -- is super boring if there isn't anything to do. This is why we defunded NASA in real life, it turns out. Exploring is boring. Freedom, it turns out, isn't enough. Gamers need tasks. We need you to tell us to do something. We want you to make us think we're free, when we're actually doing exactly what you want. That was the message of Bioshock, right?

What We Think We Want

Look, I don't just play video games because they're hyper-violent fantasies or because I'm afraid of the mosquitoes and loud noises that are outside. I play them because of their great stories. Stories like in The Last Of Us or Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line. See? This is a real medium. Shakespeare would've probably written video games if he were alive now, I bet. For sure.

The Reality

The reason video games don't have great stories is that they're games. Games are different from stories. The first goal of a video game is always to be fun, but somewhere along the line, we decided that the only way to have games be taken seriously is to give them Serious Stories. So we decided to splice in cutscenes -- whole chunks of the game in which instead of "playing," we're watching a CGI movie. This is the equivalent of playing chess with your friends, but taking five minutes before your turn to explain the motivation of your rook, and the tragic injury in his youth that prevents him from moving diagonally.

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"My father looked up at me, and with his dying breath, whispered, 'Never move diagonally.' I am a talking parapet."

I remember loving The Last Of Us's story, but when I think back on it, I realize that the story kept being hurt by the fact that it also had to be a game. In the beginning, Joel and his buddy ruthlessly murder like 50 dudes in the middle of a town, but we're still supposed to see him as a relatable hero. We're also supposed to be worried about Ellie, even though she's invincible through all the gameplay, because otherwise that'd be irritating. The game I played and the story I was following were happening in two totally different worlds, so I kept having to switch.

That's when I realizes that there are the three types of "great video game stories."

1. Thesis statements on the nature of video games (Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line)
2. Several dozen cool, loosely related ideas, scattered around a map for you to discover on your own (Fallout, Oblivion, Dark Souls)
3. Something that would work better as a movie (The Last Of Us)

Calling this stuff "stories" is the same simplistic, reductive thinking that leads game designers to throw in random references to sexual violence because they think it's mature. Games don't need to be movies. They can be games. They are games! Stop trying to make them something else! Why am I shouting at myself!?

What We Think We Want

The first thing you notice when a video game trailer hits are the "sweet new graphics," which is what my friends and I used to say to each other when we were kids, and oh god I hope that doesn't date me too much. For as long as I remember being alive (which, I repeat, is a non-specific length of time), we've been chasing that dragon of the photorealistic game. Apparently without really thinking about what it's going to be like to shoot photorealistic people with photorealistic rifles.

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Pokemon Alpha Sapphire Ruby Ultron: Now with anatomically correct blood and injury effects!

The Reality

Graphics don't matter! To anybody! And I know this is true, because as I covered in 2012, games use stereotypes as gameplay mechanics.

Again, it's not because gamers are racist. (You get in trouble if you don't say this every few sentences when discussing video games. Nobody really knows why.) It's because racism just happens to sync up with good game design really well. When we're playing a shooter, for example, we need to be able to immediately identify our enemies or our friends or power-ups at a glance. That's why a well-designed game has monsters that have immediately identifiable silhouettes:

Bethesda

And why power-ups are always in friendly colors:

Bethesda

The important part of game design isn't "rich, evocative details" or "realistic sweat stain mechanics." We're only noticing that stuff if we stop playing the game for a few seconds, sit right next to our TV, and consciously pick it out. That has nothing to do with gameplay, and gameplay is why we bought the game, and not a Jackson Pollock print to stare at while scarfing pizza bagels and energy drinks.

So sure, the technology is important, and the leaps forward in technology have made more types of games possible. But the fine detail? The "sweet graphics?" We all stopped noticing them five minutes after we picked up the shotgun.