In his closing address at the 2008 Montreal Games Summit, philosophizing Braid developer Jonathan Blow summarized the obstacles that keep games from telling meaningful, profound stories, reported Gamasutra.

Blow described the dynamic stories of games as “pretend stories, poorly structured, poorly delivered and they will always be an awkward second fiddle to linear medium.”

For the keynote lecture, available in full on Blow’s blog, the independent developer reduced his argument to three conflicts of design and storytelling: story meaning vs dynamic meaning, challenge vs progress, and interactivity vs a pre-baked delivery.

Industry conventions such as interactivity and the necessity for fun and challenging gameplay, said Blow, prevent games from telling a touching story, which is necessarily linear.

“Pac-Man is about taking drugs and going on a rampage,” Blow jokes. “But that’s a completely valid interpretation… In games, interpretation extends past the visual art — the dynamic system communicates something to the player, whether that is intentional or not.”

Even serious games must make things fun, distorting the themes with complex gameplay that offers alternate interpretations.

Blow cited BioShock’s Little Sisters as a “supposed moral quandary” undone by game balance, since you end up with the same amount of ADAM power-ups whether you save or slay the girls.

In Half-Life 2, said Blow, gameplay obstructs the player’s relationship with sidekick Alyx.

‘Alyx can’t be talking to you while you’re in the middle of a firefight or solving puzzles, so it’s in the quiet moments between, when you’re trying to get to the next section, that she plays the role of the character who has to unlock the door that will get you to the next arena.’ said Blow.

‘Of course, they want you to form a relationship with her, so she can’t just unlock it, she has to be like, “Aw man, this door is jammed. Anyway, did you hear that Dr. Kleiner just got a new girlfriend?” and all you can think is “Shut up and get the door open so I can get to where I want to go.”‘

Braid, which came out earlier this year, takes steps to avoid the conflict between story and gameplay by making the two entirely dependent on each other, both based on the passage of time.

Blow also described the problem of challenging gameplay and how it impacts the story. “For a story to be interesting, it has to occur from scene to scene in a linear and direct fashion,” Blow said, and he called challenge a friction that slows progress.

Interactivity also gets in the way of progressing the developer’s story, said Blow. “Games sabotage the timing of their delivery. In a game, you cannot control where the player does, what he just did or what he’ll do next; you can’t pre-bake that.”

Despite his criticism of gaming’s storytelling model, Blow offered little in the way of solutions to the problems he presented. Instead, he said that sculpture or painting might be better artistic reference points for games than film, “which require story progressing over time.”

Blow said the industry needs to use interactivity, challenge and gameplay to succor the story. “It is our domain and we ought to understand that,” he said of the things that distinguish gaming, “because if we want to hold our place alongside other arts, we need to play to our strengths.”