My most vivid memories from childhood came from capitalizing on my friend’s endless supply of Legos, and building.

(Not quite this complex)

We’d create elaborate landscapes, filled with castles, spaceships, trains, and airports. We’d fill these creations with stories, our living rooms playing host to massive battles, plastic metropolises, and gloomy dungeons. The opportunities offered to us by a few plastic bricks were endless and bounded only by our imagination.

As technology has progressed, the way we tell stories has gotten brighter, more dynamic, and significantly more complex. I can cruise around an accurate recreation of the entire galaxy, hunt down Rebel scum, and cruise around a photorealistic recreation of California, straight from my computer screen. And starting this year, I’ll be able to do the same things in an immersive virtual world.

But even as our storytelling horizons have expanded, they’ve become constrained. In their quest to tell cinematic stories, modern games are heavily scripted, and elaborately designed. You might be immersed into a story, but at the end of the day, someone else is telling it. Games are perfect little universes, but as a trade-off, locked up, and incredibly difficult to change.

These stories don’t come cheap. The cost of developing a modern AAA game is upwards of $50 million and requires a development and art staff numbering in the hundreds. Other platforms, such as movies or books, are equally as crowded and expensive.