All of these games share the feature of a rich back story. Indeed, the player's goal in Myst and X-Com is in large part a matter of uncovering that back story. But in each game, there is an ongoing narrative defined by the player's actions as well, simply one that's not told through dialogue or character interactions. The player in X-Com experiences an extraterrestrial onslaught, the steady improvement of Earth's technology by cannibalizing alien devices and so forth, through the gameplay itself. In this regard, the player and the character are almost perfectly attuned. Similarly, the player and the character come to understand Myst's strange worlds together by working through the mechanics and physics of puzzles. Daggerfall, for its part, had no illusion of interesting characters - most are embarrassingly flat - but instead used background lore told through books or artifacts to create a living, complex world.
Next Generation
Daggerfall and X-Com also relied heavily on procedural content, content that creates itself based on how the game unfolds. And it is precisely this sort of content that might make a truly player-driven game work.
The unapproachable but genius independent game Dwarf Fortress relies on a procedurally generated world and dwarves to allow the player incredible freedom to choose the course of his action. As flat as the "characters" in the game may be, the narrative created by their interaction is exciting and complex, driven by action rather than by complex psychological dilemmas. At the same time, however, this narrative is so closely linked to the gameplay experience it becomes transparent. The player plays the story; he doesn't watch it.
Procedural methods can generate richer characters than those found in Dwarf Fortress, as The Sims reveals. But it can't generate the dialogue that character-driven stories seem to require. We can become attached to a sim or a dwarf, just as we can become attached to an X-Com squaddie, but they're no Hamlet. It's as impossible to imagine Planescape: Torment being generated procedurally as it is to break away from the rigid course The Nameless One must follow in that game.
Combining procedural characters and dynamically managed scenarios with the rich back stories in Myst or Daggerfall, however, would yield a world more "alive" than those found in most games today. The technical and creative obstacles to designing such a game are, in fact, much more modest than those inherent in character-driven stories. The main impediment, then, is the misguided notion that it's worth sacrificing a player-driven game to achieve a character-driven story.
It may be uncomfortable for designers to let go of the wheel and let the player drive. After all, it makes for a bumpy ride. But in the end, that just makes the trip all the more exciting.
