LogFAQs > #949303076

It's certainly possible to have a good-to-great story in a video game, but it's also constrained by being an interactive medium. A video game's first duty is to be fun to play, and thus games almost uniformly allow the player to engage in the sorts of power fantasies that make grounded stories nearly impossible to tell. Like, it's ridiculous when your JRPG party fights throw a ton of enemies, but then just gives up when confronted by a few guards, because it's inconsistent, and inconsistency kills your suspension of disbelief and pulls you right out of any story

Conversely, games where the main character is not insanely overpowered tend to be pretty tedious(IMO), because you wind up being largely unable to shape the game to your will: you just have to hope you've invested your skill points in the "right" places to pass the appropriate skill checks or die. This makes it easier to tell a consistent story, but probably a lot less players will be willing to jump through the hoops to get there.

But, most of all, game development is such a ridiculous, never-ending grind and other forms of media are seen as more prestigious ways to tell a story, so the most talented storytellers tend to gravitate away from it.