“You’re sure to be in a fine haze about now,” says Gehrman in the opening few hours of the videogame Bloodborne. “But don’t think too hard about all of this. Just go out and kill a few beasts. It’s for your own good. You know, it’s just what hunters do!”

And on a surface level, that’s all the narrative you get in Bloodborne: You’ve arrived in a decrepit Victorian town seething with slavering werewolves, mad townsfolk wielding torches, and sickly crows ready to pluck out your eyes. It’s a videogame and the only buttons you can press create murder, so…you murder.

Which raises the question: Why are videogame stories so routinely derivative? Videogames aren’t a new media; they’ve been around for fifty years now. Weren’t we promised narratives that could only exist in videogames, the way we’ve had stories that could only be told in radio and movies and theater?

Why, after fifty years, are so many videogame stories no more complex than “Just go out and kill a few beasts?”

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