Even in this brief glimpse of the game, you can see the "branching list of errands" story structure that drives me fucking insane.

Let's take BioShock: Infinite again (I know I'm bringing it up a lot, but it's kind of a perfect example, and I know a lot of you have played it). As I said, it's packing a wonderful atmosphere, great world design, good voice acting, a unique soundtrack, and more -- they put so much care into it, they went broke making it.

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In the game, you start with a simple goal: Get the girl. So you do that. Now you have a new goal: Get her out of the city. That's perfectly serviceable storytelling so far -- a simple but tried and true formula. And here's where, in a film or novel, you would face a series of escalating challenges and twists that you must overcome, always propelling the story forward, scene by scene. But, see, a video game can't work that way. A game has to stretch out its two hours of story into 12 hours of gameplay. And so it sends you on a series of roundabout errands and what gamers call "fetch quests."

2K Games

"Bathroom? Oh, first you need to flip the coin for 15 heads and 15 tails. Then take the golden plunger we give you to the plumber by the carousel at midnight. Then ..."

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So once we have the girl, we're told we need to get to an airship that will transport us out of the city. But the airship is being controlled by a group of violent rebels. The rebels say they will give us the airship if we give them a bunch of guns. So we need to go find a gunsmith. We find his shop, but the gunsmith isn't there -- he's been imprisoned. So we go to the prison to find him. Once there, we find that the gunsmith is dead. But our partner knows some magic that can bring him back to life. She does, so now the gunsmith is alive again, but he doesn't have his tools (you know, to make the guns). Now we have to go find his tools. We find out they're in an impound yard. So we go looking for the impound yard ...