But until we are in a place where – without lots of technical skills – you can describe a scene, an environment, a character to a computer and it is generated and you can use it to tell a story, until we are able to completely freely adjust such scenes and plots as a gamemaster in a matter of seconds if our players surprise us (as a your group always will sooner rahter than later, no matter how good your preparation), we will remain unable to match the tabletop storytelling with modern media.

I think you are perhaps looking through too narrow a lens of what creativity and storymaking looks like — because this is very much happening in games. One of the best examples is the ascendancy of Minecraft — a game where the core engagement is one of creation and construction, not one of reflexes or action. Now I’m not saying people are creating deeply moving literary stories on the fly in Minecraft — they are mostly just building castles and cities and crazy structures. But the fact that this is the CORE of that game, and that game has been massively adopted by kids and that will change the future of the industry, is just one of many signs pointing towards the expansion of video games into whole new realms.

This is an excellent video on that specific example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8G6BFg1Wk

There are also things like the huge visual novel trend in Japan that is starting to take hold in the west — mechanically simple games that are easy to create, often using a large amount of stock imagery and settings put together in original ways with all original dialogue (much like a D&D campaign), being churned out (at varying levels of quality, to be sure) by amateurs and professionals alike, with nearly as many people making them as playing them.

There’s stuff like the new, excellent adventure games from Telltale (most notably the Walking Dead game), which are exploring the role of the player in storytelling. I think any D&D fan would agree that in a good campaign, everything doesn’t just play out linearly the way a DM envisioned — it branches and changes according to the player choices, so the player has a huge impact on the story. The degree to which that happens in a game like Walking Dead is still limited, but Telltale is aggressively and creatively working on ways to grow that type of meaningful player-as-storyteller interaction (their new The Wolf Among Us series, which just concluded its first season, has introduced substantial new choice mechanics, and there are two more major properties — Borderlands and Game of Thrones — being adapted into Telltale games with big resources behind them as we speak).

Lots of interesting storymaking happens in the metagame too. Head over to the Taleworlds Mount & Blade forums, or the Paradox Crusader Kings forums, or the reddits for either of those games. You’ll find players who have written extensive tails of their exploits, taking the basic mechanics of play and weaving them into a detailed narrative with all sorts of colour and creativity. Crusader Kings may not let me instantly describe and create any scene I can imagine — but as I play a dynasty game, guiding a line of rulers through four centuries of European history, forging marriage alliances and staging assassinations and declaring holy wars, I’m writing a story in my head (not to mention being spurred to learn a whole lot about some of the greatest true stories from history).

Obviously I can’t debate that storytelling within a computer game is “more limited” than simply “anything you can imagine” the way it ostensibly is with a tabletop game. Though, I played D&D for a while at one point, always as DM, and it is by no means simple or easy — there’s a huge amount of mechanical knowledge and technical skill that goes into creating and running a D&D campaign. If you want to invent your own world or even your own town, you need to spend a lot of time doing calculations and writing down numbers and preparing contingencies and making notes for yourself, all based on information spread throughout multiple long (and expensive) books. And to today’s younger pure-digital generation, the barrier of learning some basic LUA scripting, or similar, to expand and mod one of the many games that make modding easy is probably much lower than the barrier of starting to pore through book indices and plot out monster stats on scraps of graph paper.

So while videogame storytelling is still certainly more limited on the surface, I think you might find that what’s happening there is more exciting and much further along than you expect.