Lots of people quoting this to say a lot of the big budget narrative games aren't actually that special but like... so? (1/?) https://twitter.com/KharloKong/status/1310029019665104898

Sure a lot of the medium's biggest budget narrative games would be middling movies if they were films but integrating those stories into a game context and providing a satisfying experience that huge portions of the game playing audience enjoys is valuable (2/?)

In fact, arguably just the format of spending 15+ hours sitting around listening to characters *exist* in the world, driven by your actions, is a unique sort of narrative experience. It forms an attachment to the world and characters more akin to TV than film. (3/?)

A lot of my feed are game developers or critics and I think we're disproportionately inclined to always be looking for that next landscape changing thing but for customers that only play (or even see) 1 or 2 games a year those games can be just as interesting as anything. (4/?)

That's not to say we shouldn't be striving to integrate narrative into our medium's language more, we should! But I do think "big narrative game not that good, actually" is like a 2014 hot take at best. (5/5)