A book or a movie tells a story, but it’s always telling more or less the same story. A game tells a different story each time you play it—even when these stories have lots in common. That’s why playing the same game again and again is much more common, more justifiable, more interesting, and more exhilarating than reading the same book again and again.
Quotes by Bruno Faidutti
“Good old board games resisting bad video games” is an absurd narrative. There has never been that many boardgames sold. Boardgames are not “resisting”, they are developing more than ever. They are not coming back, since they have never receded and have never been that far. There might be a bubble, but that’s a completely different question.
A game doesn’t need zombies, astronauts or Russian gnome submariners to tell a story. Even the most abstract games are story builders, as can be seen with chess. A game of chess has no setting, it’s not really a representation of war, but it has a beginning and an end, it has suspense and reversals, and it can be dramatically retold—so every game is a different story. Of course, this is even more true of a game of Zombicide.
There is, however, an important difference between games on the one hand, and movies, or novels, or even music on the other. The game itself is not a story, it’s a story generator.
Gaming is both about freedom and constraints—it’s about making free decisions under strictly constraining rules, while real life is about making decisions of which we don’t know if they are really free, under extremely mysterious rules.