Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 168)

Trigger Happy
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even thinner with more action-oriented games whose
diachronic stories are less rich with suggestion: the
story of what a player does during a game of Robotron
will just be a tedious list of movements and shootings,
or more generously a higher-level, but still highly
abstract—and uninvolving to anyone who is not the
player—cyclical narrative about patterns of attack and
rhythms of success and failure.
If these games can be said to have a “story” at all, it
is untranslatable—it is a purely kinetic one. The
diachronic story of a videogame, however complex, is
merely an excuse for the meat, the videogame action;
while the synchronic story, as a story, is virtually
nonexistent. This is not a criticism of videogames, not a
sign of their impoverishment—it is simply pointing out
that, in general, they are doing something totally
different from traditional narrative forms.
But since a diachronic story is by definition
unchangeable—remember, it happened in the past—it
surely must be the synchronic story, the thing that the
videogame player is able to change at will, which is
essential to the possibility of “interactive storytelling.”
But we have just decided that many videogames so far
don’t have synchronic stories at all. So what’s going
on?