A medium is anything a signal passes through, and one can build up from the physical layers, the wires, speakers and photons, and cross into the abstract layers, such as paintings, songs and movies. These group further into similar art forms, such as ‘the moving image’, ‘the visual arts’, or ‘the auditory arts’. Part of the excitement surrounding videogames is that we’re part of a whole new species of art, ‘interactive art’, and therefore siblings with any other art in which the audience can change the content in real time. Skipping further ahead in the taxonomy, a ‘story’ is one type of content that can be carried by a signal, but there’s plenty in between. If a story is the equivalent of a novel, then each art form also has sentences, paragraphs and chapters that bridge the gap.

Shots, scenes and sequences are some of these smaller units in film, and even at this scale they capture the unique power of the moving image. You might have an idea for a scene that makes excellent use of the medium. An overdosing woman is revived by jabbing a hypodermic needle of adrenaline into her heart. A pair of gangsters fail to make cheery small talk with a furious acquaintance at whose house they’ve just arrived in a car containing a headless corpse. Good stuff. But can you chain together several of these into a larger structure?

A great story is more than just a random collection of good scenes. A good scene articulates a single moment, but a good story shows how the moments fit together in life and can combine many such scenes without collapsing under its own weight, because the structure holds it up. Stories are the most conventional such structure, but there are others. A great album of music is more than the sum of its parts, the songs having some thematic relationship to each other and the larger work, related by rules that are easier to feel than articulate. Baraka is an amazing film that’s like an album of scenes instead of songs: disconnected portrayals of the real world that flow without narrative but with a gratifying sense of structure.

Videogames are a new way of telling stories, but we certainly don’t need stories to be a valid art form. My DIY media theory gets a little overtaxed at this point, but I believe the small unit of interactive art is the experience. In other words, videogames create experiences and this is the equivalent of a scene in a film. A single experience might be something like ‘driving’ or ‘climbing’ or ‘buying supplies’ – any collection of interactions with a distinct feel. Even without a story or larger structure, simply by providing these experiences, videogames are making a unique contribution.

Take a simple, structure-free game about growing a garden. People could become as emotionally invested in this game as they would about tending a real-life garden. There could be no film equivalent that would ever work, as audiences would be bored to death by two hours of footage of weed pruning. For whatever reason, experiences have a different sort of longevity than scenes.

The idea of overall structure is an interesting one, however. What is the equivalent of a story in a film except told with experiences instead of scenes? What is the equivalent of an album made up of experiences rather than songs? Are we already on top of this? Half-Life 2 has seamless transitions between the experiences of ‘shoot’ and ‘explore and observe the world’, and it wrests the most from them by providing them over and over from every possible angle. This ‘do one thing and do it well’ philosophy of game design is economic but crude and has a tendency to lead to flat and degenerate structures, like albums that have nearly the same song for hours.

Zelda games switch up their experiences very often – for example, riding your horse, searching for treasure, fighting octoroks – perhaps so often that these smaller loops flatten out when seen from the distance of the full game. The structure shouldn’t exist solely to create enough variety to keep players invested, it should also to bind together experiences into a more meaningful whole by virtue of specifically how they are bound together.

In Eternal Darkness, playing a terrified and possessed pageboy felt very different from playing a portly colonial lord, and the overall story bound the experiences together with a conceptual hub that was also interactive. That’s good structure. The structure of the DS game Feel The Magic felt most like a musical album: a collection of completely different minigames that you experienced once apiece, bound by a loose theme about seducing the girl of your dreams. I’d love to play a game like an M Night Shyamalan story, with a twist midway through that changes the types of experiences being provided, turning the game into something surprisingly different to what you thought you were playing.

Structure. It’s cool. We already think about it some. We could think about it some more.

Randy Smith is the co-owner and game designer of Tiger Style, whose first game, Spider, is due for release soon for iPhone.