d) Dear Esther is about a place that is the story, Virginia is a story about the story. As a result, Dear Esther’s story is driven by environmental interaction, and Virginia’s story is driven by human interaction (even if any of these “interactions” are in your head only). Dear Esther offers an illusion that you control the environmental interaction (the island is an open world space), Virginia does not offer the luxury of such a deception for its human interaction.

Bearing all of the above in mind, the best way I can explain the difference between Virginia and Dear Esther is that the latter, despite the lack of any physical interaction, made you believe that you, the player, matter. Meanwhile, Virginia turns you into a soulless, broken remote controller.

But for the first half an hour, Virginia was interesting. That’s the problem with video games: pressing buttons and seeing things happen on the screen as a result of that is the curse of video games, because it makes things more interesting than they really are.

No, yeah, I really mean it.

Look, a boring movie is a boring movie. When the cinema was invented, all they had to show was a train approaching the screen and people were excited as if they just discovered an alien life on Mars. Once the novelty wore off, though, filmmakers actually had to make their movies interesting: hilarious, sad, shocking — whatever worked. But just showing stuff on a big screen no longer worked.

Meanwhile, gamers still give games a pass just because interactivity in itself is so much fun. And if a game offers something new in the interaction and visual departments, well, GIFs on Reddit get thousands of upvotes because look at these fucking rocks moving in Uncharted 4.

This curse is one of the reason why we live with crappy story-telling in games, and why games don’t evolve as fast as movies had to, because hey, maybe the story was stupid and the characters flat, but holy shit was the final boss intense.

To be clear, I am under the same spell. I could not sleep after I’ve seen a skeleton casting a 3D shadow in the demo of Into the Shadows, and I still enjoy just making Mario jump around without any real purpose.

So, initially, Virginia was interesting. Just because of the joy of a computer program reacting to buttons.

But then after an hour I asked myself: “Okay, but why does Virginia exist in a video game form?” (or: “Okay, but why does Virginia exist in a software form?” for those of you who still live in 2012).

I asked myself this question trying to figure out if Virginia’s form enhances the experience in any way.

I think it’s a crucial question to ask. All forms of art offer a unique experience, which is why it’s often so hard to turn a book into a movie. And that’s great, that’s wonderful.

But it the case of Virginia, the way it handles the experience does not enhance it in any way. There’s just nothing there. No, scratch that, whatever is in there is actually making the experience worse, because walking, and you walk very slowly, and looking around, and you look around very slowly, and finding a hot spot to click on to move the action forward is detrimental to the experience.

My own definition of what is a game is that if you can turn the experience into a movie and nothing whatsoever will be lost, then it’s not a game and it’s just a waste of everybody’s time.

As you can see, it’s a very broad definition of a game, and so far only Virginia does not cut it.

Virginia could easily be a movie, and nothing would be lost. With the amount of and the quality of its story it’d be nothing more than a ten minute long Vimeo from someone who loves Lynch but does not understand him — but that would still be better than the same thing inflated to 90 minutes by slowly walking through meaningless corridors.

This is usually when I tell you that hey, it’s just me, but your mileage may vary, and some people love the game (they do) and it got some amazing reviews (it did). But not this time. Instead, it’s time for even more critique, so I highly recommend this excellent, and I mean excellent review of the game at Kill Screen (of all places!):