Really? Of all the things that I think video games offer, "more powerful" storytelling is not one of them. A video game will never hold a candle to my professor telling me stories of his time in the Vietnam War. Or my father telling me how he met my mother. Oral storytelling, to me, will always be far more "powerful" than video games will ever be.
I dunno. To make a point and as an introduction to these forums, I've been gaming for ~18 years now. I've also spent the last 4 years researching gaming, game media, and gaming experience in academia. As far as storytelling goes, games have some novelty. They offer repeatability with flexibility - you can "re-read" a video game like you might a book and you can also affect the progress of the story. Games can also provide unique toy boxes for making your own stories (The Sims), like you might with a box of Lego's. I also personally think the first-person perspective is a tool that is sort of uniquely practical in video games - some films have tried it and mostly failed, but it seems to work in games. So there's some potential there for novelty. They also offer spectacle on command. Pretty pictures and engaging sounds at the push of a button, as it were.
This is all very exciting for a lot of reasons. But it essentially only means that video games offer a potentially unique experience compared to other media, not a more "powerful" one. Keep in mind you're losing things for that uniqueness - the ability to pace a story like a book or movie can, for instance. For a more "powerful" (what I take to mean a more emotional or "moving") experience, well, you'd have to believe Andrew Glassner or Chris Crawford with regards to the potential of the media. I personally think they're fundamentally misguided, but I'm also a cynic. At the very least, the idealized interactive storytelling that they envision, a personalized, movie-like experience as if on a Holodeck, won't happen in my lifetime, so I wouldn't hold your breadth.
