What kinds of story and message can we do in video games that cannot be done so well in other mediums?

problem solving strategies

They can''t really make rules for us because they don''t know anything about what we do.

MindEngine Development
http://medev.sourceforge.net

ambience.

Think of games as creating microworlds, not stories. The stories are created by the player using the abstract layers of the world to uncover the details that the designer did not plan for, but allowed. This gives the player the ability to create things for himself.

In a movie, you can''t make the audience feel like they are part of the world or that anything they experience is their own. In a game, you can.

When you tell stories to your friends about playing Halo (as an example), do you tell them how you encountered the flood for the first time, or do you tell them how you were driving the warthog off a cliff, landed on 2 jackals, and then jumped out and plasma''d an elite?

The question is, how do you realistically and believably
"allow drama to be created" in your world without making the player feel like it was pre-planned?

Human interaction.

Music has sound
Visual Art has images
Storytelling has plots

Movies have sound, plots and images. They combine the first three arts

Games have sound, plots, images and interaction. They are the natural progression of the expressive medium.

I''ve always thought of video games as a journey into the human imagination. The more sophisticated cames get, the more true this becomes.