Interactive storytelling: control over a character means an abstracted existence in the game world, which makes storytelling difficult

Here's a reason it's difficult to have strong storytelling when the player has control over a character in a game. 

Consider the way the player character may move about in the game world. In a typical 3D game, the player can control the direction the character moves in, and often the speed that they're moving at. In some games, they can make the character crouch down, jump, or climb.

In most games, the movement is always exactly the same. There's the same running animations that are always used. If the player walks into a part of the environment that blocks their movement, such as a kitchen table, they'll have to change direction to move around the table. And the whole time the same movement animations will be used.

In the real world, there are a lot of details to how a person moves through their environment. The kinds of steps they take, their posture, how they may put their hand on objects that they pass by. Those details are affected by the person's nature, their state of mind at the time, and also their intentions. While they are in the kitchen cooking something, their steps may be quite different to when they're on their way through their kitchen to go outside.

Some games, such as in the Uncharted series, do try to capture some of the actual ways characters move through an environment, while that character is under the player's control. But even in these cases, they only capture a small part of what actual movement is like.

So in general, the player character's movement is fairly abstracted and generic, compared to people's movement in real life. The player can make the character do things like walk in a particular direction, but they can't control the nature of that walking. This is not the criticise the games or the game developers. There's all sorts of good reasons why it is like that.

I am focusing on the player's control over the character. In non-interactive cutscenes, the character will act in this more natural way. And in gameplay segments, there will be elements of that, such as in the "bad ass" way your character in a third-person game might hold a big gun while they're firing it, or in the "tough" way they reload the gun. But the player has no control over those sorts of details.

The same abstraction is there in the other ways the player character exists in and interacts with the game world. It's common in games for characters to be able to look at, and interact with, objects in the game environment. Looking at the object might bring up a description, or a 3D model of it that can be rotated around. Interacting with an object will trigger the character to perform some sort of action, such as toggling a light switch, opening a cupboard, or talking to a person.

These things are handled in a very abstracted way. The player tells the character to interact with the object, but has no further control over how that interaction happens.

To illustrate why that's very abstracted, consider how, in real life, someone might make and eat their breakfast. They might be still quite sleepy, and slowly shuffle about, assembling the ingredients. They might absent-mindedly prepare it, like putting bread in the toaster, chucking the toasted bread on a plate, and spreading a bit of butter on it. Then taking that and the coffee they prepared out to the back steps and sitting down to have them. They might place the mug and plate to the side, and alternate between sips of coffee, bits of bread, and taking in their surrounds. They might give a small sigh as they finish, dust off their hands, grab the mug and plate, and head back inside.

It's not possible in a game to have the sort of nuanced control that would be required for the player to have control over those details of what that character did. The player has essentially zero control over such details.

This isn't to criticise the games or game developers, as there are good reasons why games are like that. It's just to note that the character exists in the game world in a pretty abstracted fashion.

Here's some other ways that the character exists in an abstracted way. Consider a JRPG where the party of characters is going on an adventure through some lands towards a far-off place. In real life, such journeying would affect their physical and mental state. They would get tired and sore. At times they might feel despondent at how much of the journey they have left. They would need to sleep. In most games these sorts of details are abstracted away (during the gameplay segments, at least).

And that's because abstracting away those sorts of details is better for the gameplay.

I want to have a name for the kinds of details that are abstracted away. We can think of acting. A good actor has nuanced control over their entire body, in terms of posture, movement, body language, vocal control, facial expressions, etc -- at every moment in time. The timing of these details is important. There is how they go about moving through and interacting with details in their environment. All of these details reflect the character's emotional state and their intentions.

Are their movements languorous, or skittish? How do they sit in a chair? What is their body language, and where are they facing, when they're talking to different people?

We can call all these details the "performance". The performance details are abstracted away when the player has control over a character.

These performance details are very important to the storytelling in movies, TV, etc. Their absence, while the player has control over a character, is a reason why it's difficult to have strong storytelling within the gameplay.