Historical texts are works of art. They unite incongruent historical facts into a definite narrative, just as a composer builds a symphony out of contrapuntal, sometimes dissonant sounds. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, traced out in negative space. Internal tensions invite a reading against the grain: What does it mean to impose a shape onto history? Need history have happened this way? The open-ended questions prompted by a definite narrative suggests possibilities beyond the narrative’s inherent boundaries. As with all art, a historical narrative is always bursting at the seams. Every choice brings resistance against itself.
On the surface, video games appear to be more open-ended than a traditional historical narrative, but this can be highly misleading. Whereas a historical text leaves possibilities unspecified, a video game does not. Alternate choices are explicitly codified as game mechanics in strict chains of cause and effect: if you do X, Y will happen, as opposed to Z. At best, some randomness can be injected, which anyway can never fundamentally shift the nature of the game. By codifying possibilities explicitly, the horizon of possibility is circumscribed. This fact is hidden from the player, who might instead marvel at the breadth of in-game paths, which are nevertheless always a pale mockery of true freedom. If freedom is the recognition of necessity, games hide necessity under the guise of freedom.
But unfreedom is characteristic of all art. If the codification of possibilities is a problem latent to the medium, the point would be to reveal it. Just as the avant-garde architects of the early 1900s sought to reveal their construction materials unadorned, we should choose to exhibit the form of the video game in all its unfreedom. Only against the critical recognition of unfreedom can the possibility of freedom appear.