When it comes to the "Bioshock" series from Irrational Games, the first thing anybody points to is the story and the world - not necessarily the gameplay. It played well, the plasmids were a great combat mechanic, but the ideas of indoctrination and the perfect society set within the grand, disemboweled dystopian city of "Rapture," were the framework for creating one of the most engaging games of that year.
You could say the same for all of video gaming history. Bioshock was a success, not because of its characters, but because of its setting and the emerging confrontations that came about within it. The upcoming "Bioshock Infinite" seeks to replicate that success with a new story and a new setting, but based on the same principles of storytelling - build that intriguing, controversial world, and you could throw anybody into it, nameless and faceless or otherwise under the constraints of any kind of narrative, and your game might just give players a brand new kind of experience. They just happen to be giving the main character a name this time.
Columbia is a floating city, literally "above" everything else, built on the ideals of American Exceptionalism. America, because of its unique revolutionary history, is above any kind of natural or manmade rule. The inhabitants and warring factions within the city idolize various American Political figures, and in some ways Columbia's unraveling mirrors Rapture's downfall, only it's happening now, as protagonist Booker DeWitt begins his journey.
Sure, you could point to a game like "The Walking Dead" as a glaring exception to the theory (it's arguable whether that's really a video game at all). In reality, the question of how video games can tell stories is being answered in many ways and at varying degrees of success, but the answer to how video games can evolve the way we tell stories may just be "Bioshock's" greatest contribution to the medium. It's not the people, it's the world in which they're thrown in which creates the tale, and while plenty of films strive to do this, video games are uniquely suited towards approaching stories in this way. A film cannot be explored, a video game can.
