I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can.
Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.
> Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
I have given up on getting a good story out of emergent gameplay and sandbox-y games. Bioshock 1 & 2 is about as good as it's going to get with regards to producing a good story that can go multiple ways. Those games moved me like very few songs or books ever did.
Dwarf fortress is a pretty good stochastic story generator, it's head and shoulders above anything else in that vein. But yeah, those kinds of stories will never really be quite as focused or meaningful as human-crafted narrative
I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can.
Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.