I’d like to tell you a story about telling stories. It ends with a headless man, and may contain nudity, but it starts off with buzzwords.

Yes, buzzwords. I like to think of them as the attractive and contagious form of stupid ideas. I still chuckle over the Emotion Engine, for example, much like I might chuckle over a rascally old uncle with a ruddy face, twinkling eyes, and a litany of tall tales about getting naughtily drunk with buxom young gals. Well done, Sony, truly you created an Engine for Emotions, now tell me the one about it being the year of the PS3.

Because what’s particularly chuckleworthy is when it turns out that the same dirty old uncle was not only as chaste as a castrato, but also hadn’t seen a real booby since 1842 (and that was when he was being breast fed). Buzzwords and buzz ideas are ultimately empty, but they’re also funny. And, like I said when I wrote about E3, the way that the future hopes of the industry are sold is often far more interesting than the resulting products. The stories gaming tells itself are also a far more reliable indicator of what gaming was trying to achieve, particularly when it’s ambling up a blind alley.

The story gaming was telling itself in E206 involved the great modern buzzword ‘emergent’ again, only this time with a difference. Not emergent as in gameplay, which I think sounds a lot better than it means, but in this case emergent stories or narrative.

Emergent Storytelling? What can it mean? Well, as expounded by the three industry types in E206, it seems to be the answer to gaming’s problems with telling stories. Because, you see, all of history’s narrative modes have been rendered irrelevant because of the invention of interactivity. Great! Stitch that Tolstoy! How do you like them apples?

Let’s stop and think about that for a minute. Apparently the ability to press x means that we’ve radically redefined what constitutes a story.  But doesn’t that sound a little suspect? Because while interactivity might change our experience of a story, does it really reconstitute what makes one? Is going for a walk without an umbrella and being caught in a rainstorm an emergent story of dampness, or is it just what happened when I went to the shop to buy some fags? And does it really matter?

Let’s have a gaming ‘for example’. Let’s imagine it’s the future, and I’m interactively playing the 27th iteration of an exciting EA sports game. I dunno, let’s call it Leopard Forests Golf 2043. While I’m playing, I score a kittywake, or a peregrine, or something by hitting my It’s-In-The-Game-Ball off a tree and accidentally looping it into the cuppy hole. This will be an exciting and amusing event, and I may well talk about it with my online friends, or maybe even at work the next day.

But what I’ll be talking about will be what I did. That’s all it is. It’s not a story about me, or about golf, or even about trees. It’s also not a story even if I did it in an interesting and unforeseen way. Because ’something happened’ isn’t the same as a story.

Stumbling across cool stuff is the experience of playing a game, but the story is why you’re in the kind of world where cool things can happen in the first place. And, more importantly, story is often the why behind where you’re going. It’s about context, motivation, experience, and most of all that there’s an inevitable path that, regardless of how it’s delivered or where it ends up, must be in some way prescribed. That’s in much the same way that your narrative won’t have double jumps in it if they haven’t been coded, no matter how much you might want your story to emerge out of pressing x twice to get up walls.

Emergent Storytelling, then, raises a lot of interesting questions but very few meaningful answers. Because it seems to be a way of avoiding answering the biggest questions gaming and narrative have to ask of each other by pretending it’s all down to player choice.

Why is it pretending? Because those choices are always to some degree hard-coded into the gameworld. Limitless choice is always a matter of fooling someone into feeling as if everything they might choose to do is in there, rather than the impossibility of being able to deliver it all.

And that’s why more freedom doesn’t mean better stories, it means different experiences. Yes, stories and gameplay currently jar, but reinventing the idea of how they fit is, I think, an avoidance rather than a solution.

By the same token, the history of sandbox gaming is littered with frustration because the illusion of freedom is at odds with the directionless experience of it. It’s much like the pretence that giving a player more superficial choices will lead to more meaning, in the way it ends up with people customising avatars in lieu of having any real connection to them. Sandbox games are similarly littered with the corpses of meaningless and tedious meanderings in search of a point and a purpose. It’s perhaps why the successes are not only rare but also very focussed on delivering a coherent world rather than an open story.

It’s also why games that don’t need stories, like Tetris or Galaxy Wars, are so compelling on their own terms. And let’s not forget that if anything invented emergent gameplay, it was probably Tetris. Because what’s significant in emergent gameplay is the experience of improvisation rather than inventing a radical new form of gaming.

Which brings us back to the problem: Emergent storytelling is just as empty a promise. It isn’t the holy grail, it’s a naked emperor.

Unfortunately, it’s not very fashionable to point out naked emperors. You can run round shouting ’look, look, the emperor’s got no clothes on,’ but all it’s going to get you is beheaded. Occasionally it might get you retrospectively canonised, but it’s better to have a head than be a dead saint, if only for the simple reason that it’s difficult to enjoy anything without a head. Getting beheaded is also not going to sell you a lot of magazines or games. Mind you, canonisation doesn’t exactly shift units, either. I’ll never buy Pope Wars 3: The Popeinating. It’ll be rubbish.

So perhaps it’s time to drop gaming’s obsession with running away with its own head, too. Because you can’t turn water into wine by telling someone that it’s wine. You have to learn how to make the damn stuff properly, and maybe on the way you might discover brandy.

And that’s why we need quality publications to point out when someone’s left the wine out of the water, or is wandering about naked talking about their fab new threads. Emergent hard truths might end up leading somewhere far more interesting than badly told stories like this one.