[potatolicious]

I agree with the gist of your post but I think the author was making a deeper point with it.

It's not just that storytelling has taken over at the expense of gameplay, it's that we haven't even really developed our own storytelling capability.

When games tell stories they stop the action, freeze player agency, and go into full Hollywood mode. Game studios trip all over themselves to excitedly tell us about how their new technology will allow them Hollywood-like cinematic camera angles (see: Mass Effect), movie-quality camera effects. Hell, a lot of games even letterbox the screen to give it a more film-like quality.

It's one thing to take storytelling expertise and technique from cinema, it's another to clone it obsessively and completely fail to develop your own storytelling medium. Imagine if movies were invented only for "filmmakers" to simply film a book from top-down and a hand turning the pages!

One game I've been enjoying is Kentucky Route Zero - the story I find is fairly normal, but the way it's presented takes pretty clear inspiration from traditional stage plays. This is cool - even if it is still derivative, but at least it's taking another medium and adapting it appropriately to a game.