Trigger Happy
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?
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