I'm tired of the cliche of games being all up to you. You make the rules, you make the story, you are the hero, you save the world, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you. Good Lord how tiresome it can be from a certain angle.

I don't want a game where I decide everything. That's called life and art, and even then, I can't decide everything.

In a game, just as in any other art I find and appreciate, I am constrained by the choices of an artist (or several). If I weren't, I wouldn't be interested.

Gigantic worlds that take hundreds of hours to explore are not appealing to me, they are off-putting.

Maybe others are trying to replace their lives wholesale, or maybe that's a judgmental - and, besides, inaccurate - way to see it. Regardless, I don't want total freedom. When I do, I write a poem or improvise some music or go on a walk and reflect and daydream about whatever catches my fancy. Or I just dance to a tune where no one can see (or form an opinion). Games don't help free me in that way. An inordinately long game in a "real" world "up to me" is a proposition that sounds like prison, actually.

Games do offer choices, and that is interesting. But they cannot leave everything up to me, and when they claim to, they are lying, and I don't know why that lie is so appealing to so many. Ok, I do, sort of. It's just I don't look to games for that part of life. Games offer flow, they offer puzzles, they offer unsolvable paradoxes, they offer movement and delight and discovery. But a space in which everything is up to me? That's a blank page. That's silence you sing with. That isn't a game.