Beyond Angry Birds

Here is an interesting thought: Of the two most literarily compelling video games I played this year, one (Sword & Sworcery) incorporates maybe four pages of text total and the other (Surviving High School) is intended for the driver’s-ed crowd. Exactly how damning is it that both games feature characters that play more fascinatingly against type than virtually all of the committee-written games that emerge from the other side of big-budget game development? Utterly and completely damning, I would argue. I would also argue that it suggests that the problems of so many narrative games are not, at the end of the day, terribly complicated. Maybe they are not problems at all but rather ordinary failures of human imagination.