It's helpful if you don't think of them as telling separate stories. It's more like watching different interpretations of Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. It's basically the same story over and over, but if it's told well, then it can still be entertaining.
This is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside.
There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium.
They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories.
It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining".
When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.
Well maybe I had it backwards. Maybe FPS's are trying to tell different stories but for some reason they all try to use the same tools to do it. Really, shooting people is not the best way to tell most stories. The creators of the Drake's Uncharted series, really great FPS games, are complaining that it's hard to get any serious dramatic emotion in a game that has you getting shot at most of the time.
What do you propose the player does in an action oriented, modern, gun-based game? What skill based mechanic can eat up 30 hours of a 40 hour game and is superior to point and click FPS shooting?
At the end of the day, your player has to PLAY the game and I guess I can understand the frustration of the grinding and the mechanic, but I fail to see what is superior.
Maybe people want more games like Heavy Rain? I loved Heavy Rain, it was an incredibly engaging and emotional story. I had a great connection with the characters and story, but there's only one problem: it's basically a choose your own adventure movie. Lots of watching, some playing, very little skill involved.
Blue Lacuna http://playthisthing.com/blue-lacuna is a modern, ambitious adventure game with no graphics at all. Actually there's lots of drama in "interactive fiction" games, but most of them aren't 30 hours long. I think it's possible for RTS's to have strong storylines, require skill and interactivity, and fancy graphics to boot. Although I'm not sure it's a strictly better medium for storytelling, at least it's different.
Edit - continuing:
Ico is fairly engaging and even intense in places, and it doesn't involve guns. Little flash games like N+ are actiony and you don't have to shoot people. I think a AAA high-budget game with N+ mechanics would be awesome. Darwinia is a good example of telling a story in a RTS.
Lots of games, even FPS games, involve stealth. So that's something you can do in an "action oriented, modern, gun-based game" other than killing hordes of random enemies. Another action-oriented mechanics is hand-to-hand combat, from realistic(ish) UFC fighting games to Ninja Gaiden or even Mad World.
I don't think anyone is suggesting this is an easy problem or that there is some answer already out there for the taking. You can lament that state of the art gaming technology is put to use pandering to largely adolescent and tremendously violent fantasies without knowing all the answers.
That being said, a great example of simple, (relatively) nonviolent gameplay giving way to countless hours of playing time is Minecraft. A Minecraft or even BridgeBuilder clone with this CryEngine would be pretty rad.
Somehow Total Recall (premise of the short story[1], as illustrated by the movies) seems a good starting point for this discussion: what do you want to remember for the first time? and have it unique to your experience?
([1] - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, but everybody knows it as Total Recall.)
Well, an audience that doesn't look for variety, that instead only wants to hear the same story told over and over again - that's an uncultured audience in my book, no matter what story.
