Why do computer games have weak stories?

Some years ago, I began to read that parents were really scared that children would spend all their time playing computer games and would lose out on the fun things of childhood, like playing in a park, doing sports, mucking about with paints and mud, or, yes, you guessed it... reading a book or listening/inventing to a story. As it turns out, research has pointed out that out children are in fact quite actively pursuing what interest them, and that on average, they are not spending an inordinate amount of time playing computer games. In fact, most very young children spend quite a bit of their time engaged in fantasy play where they are, yes, indeed, inventing and acting out stories.

It must be a sign of ageism, because I love computers and digital technology but fail to get totally captivated by computer games. Probably because the plots are mostly predictable and in many cases violent. Jesper Julles at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference in Norway in 1998 made a direct comparison between computer games and stories. I am quoting verbatim from his full presentation which you can read here. He came up with this neat comparison table..

"This leads us to a final comparison of the relationship between narratives and computer games:

Narratives	Computer games
Fixed sequence	Flexible sequence
Variable speed (usually compressed)	Fixed speed
Story/discourse	Program/material
Past	Present
Needs human or anthropomorphic actors	Can be abstract
Narrative desire	Desire for understanding & performance
Consume once	Play many times

• Narratives are fixed sequences, games are flexible sequences.
• Narratives vary in the speed with which they are told; uninteresting periods of time are skipped; the movie 48 hours doesn't last 48 hours. Computer games, especially the action game, are fixed speed, real time.
• A narrative has a dualism between the story and the discourse, the computer game is divided between the formal program and the material.
• A narrative is basically something past, a computer game something present.
• A narrative needs human or anthropomorphic actors, a game can be abstract. You can’t imagine a narrative as abstract as Tetris.
• In a narrative, the reader desires to know the ending. In a game, the player wants to understand the structure of the game and to acquire the skills to use this knowledge.
• A narrative is something you consume once, a game is something you play many times.

To sum it up. Computer games and narratives are very different phenomena. Two phenomena that fight each other. Two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time. Any interactive narrative or attempt at interactive storytelling is a zigzag between these two columns".

I liked his comparison table very much and mostly agree with his premises, but I do not think that a narrative is always something in the past. In storytelling, the teller is indeed recounting a past event, but everytime the story is told, even by the same person, the story metamorphoses a little and it is never the same. In this case, the story is always present and never in the past. Even narratives recorded in books, are not quite static because the reader absorbs different elements of the narrative and therefore transforms it in his or her own mind. whenever I read, I never absorb everything; my mind takes what I can absorb, disregards what I cannot comprehend and discards what is trivial to my state of mind although, maybe what I have discarded is curcially important to the author. This happened to me once, when I was giving a lecture in Colombia and a person waited until coffee time to discuss line by line one of my papers. He had read into my work, much more depth than what I had originally intended. The text is there, immobile and fixed, but the mind of the reader assigns depth and meaning completely out of the control of the author of the text. This is why I beleive firmly that a printed narrative is as fluid as a story germinating in the imagination of a listener.