For me there are much better mediums for storytelling than computer games. They cant really hope to compete with literature (prose, comics etc) or drama (film, plays etc) on that front.
I generally dislike games that are just a play-through story. I don't think the Godfather would be a better story if it was interspersed with inventory puzzles, nor would James Joyce read better if it was required to solve a lever puzzle after every other page.
The big advantage of computer GAMES (that word is all-important) is their ability to present an interactive, changeable world.
It is this aspect of exploration and adventure that brought me to the games personally. This is why I primarily love 1st Person games, preferaby with an anonymous or little defined character (so that i can easilly interject myself into their place), although i also enjoy third person games a lot too, as long as the emphasis is on exploring interesting environments and the feeling that i am having a wonderful adventure that I couldn't have in real life (Syberia would be a good example). This can be a fantastical, Science Fiction, horrific, historical, real world, even an erotic setting, anything, so long as I get that sense of adventure and exploration.
Now, this doesn't mean that i consider the writing to be unimportant - far from it. It is very important. But i like to see that writing talent applied to world building, the architect's creativity, rather than the bard's. Riven is the perfect example of a brilliantly written game to me. The story is there but it is in service to the goal of creating a marvellous vehicle for adventure for the player, rather than as a vehicle for the marvellous ego of a computer programmer who fancies himself a 'serious author'. The creativity of the writer in that game goes into creating a brilliantly cohesive world that remains logical despite it's fantastical nature, where everything that the player sees is relevant to the workings of the game world and in which the game world can become much bigger than it really is by putting in enough creative detail to allow the player to discern so much more that is going on 'behind the scenes'. There's more to the writer's art than plotting.
Graphics are very important to me too, though in an aesthetic sense, rather than a technical one. I want the environments I Explore to be visually compelling and evocative. Poorly rendered environments put me off immensly. I don't really want to imagine the setting for myself; that isn't making proper use of the medium. That isn't through lack of imagination on my part; i write myself and consider myself a creative individual. My own imagination is more than capable of rendering interesting landscapes and characters, something I enjoy doing when i read or write prose (that is one of the strong points of that medium in that it stimulates the reader's own imagination). That is only interfered with when confronted with poor or unimaginative graphics in a game because my freedom to imagine it for myself is taken away and the 'imaginings' that are given to me instead, by the creator of the game are poor. I want to see the wonderful visual creation of a talented graphical artist. But this shouldn't be mistaken for a demand for cutting edge graphics. Much of the greatest art of all time has been created with coloured pigment on stone or canvas or pen on paper. Fantastic imagery can be created with primitive graphics tools - it all depends upon the talent of the artist, not the technology they are working with. A tool has never been invented that can mimic true artistic creativity.
So it is this overall world-building that I love in adventure games, when talented artists, writers and game designers come together to create a compelling and arresting world which i can wander through and enjoy great adventures within.
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