I don't know that these two should be taken too seriously...but hey, it's a quiet Sunday and it might be worth a conversation. Corvus Elrod's Man Bytes Blog has two conspiracy theories on the current state of PC gaming and story-telling vs graphics. The first is titled A True Profit...er, Prophet and observes that some large sites like to run the "PC gaming is dead" (or similar) line so often, you'd think they might profit from the idea.

The second is called The Curse of Voodoo and laments the lack of progress in storytelling and asks if money from video hardware manufacturers has encouraged the focus on graphics:

We shouldn’t be grateful for the quality of story in today’s games. We shouldn’t be appreciative to the studios for the mere story-crumbs they allow to be sprinkled into our games. We shouldn’t cut anybody slack due to the allegedly primitive nature of their tools. The decision to de-emphasize the importance of story in our game narratives was exactly that–a decision. Somewhere, at some point in time, someone decided to move away from a focus on story. We haven’t come a long way, despite the challenges inherent in the task. We have, in fact, backslid–tremendously. None of the big studios seem to be sinking large amounts of money into telling better stories via gameplay. There are no successful middle-ware story engines. All of our focus as an industry has been elsewhere–photo-realistic graphics.