Games as Art Debate

It's more a story than a game isn't it?

A movie is something you watch, a game is something you play. It's not there to tell you a grand story. It's there to wrap some good gameplay in some storytelling packaging. A game is closer to a novel than it is to a hollywood movie. The most loved games (high replayability is a key component) often have quite lacking "story" if any story at all. What makes them shine is how they feel to play, even better if they encourage your own imagination to invent your own story. When

Games aren't novels, if that is what you want. It's interactive storytelling. The interaction of story, gameplay, world building, relationships, choices, and immersion. Each individual element might not be extremely satisfying in isolation. But when combined into a cohesive experience it's something unique altogether. Mass Effect is likely revered because of how well it does that. Not because it is a good novel.

There's nothing special about a game compared to any other form of media, or any form of fictional storytelling which make them immune to having an influence. You have to suspend disbelief in any novel, nevertheless no matter how outlandish the material it always communicates some ideas about the way the world works. I'm actually really looking forward to people giving up on the implicit idea that video games are just fancies or toys, because it's at that point that video games wh

This is something which didn't come through in my original post, but I feel one of the major problems here is that people are trying to compare video games to other mediums such as theatre, movies, and books. In other words, video games are an art form which is different enough that direct comparisons to other art forms may be misleading. Now I realize that we are talking about the general quality of plot in games, and not the wider debate regarding whether video games constitute art. That

They may not be "games", but titles like Gone Home are still video games, they aren't about "beating" something, and they aren't simply toys either.

How is a video game superior to TV? Storylines on prestige TV shows blow most videogames out of the water

my theory is a there are two camps of "games" (really more of a spectrum from the projection of 2 axes "play" and "art"):- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)<

Best games don't tell stories - they generate them. There's no need to make games more like movies or graphic novels because we already have movies and graphic novels.

Your thinking is so antiquated name me a good novel and I'll give a video game that matches it in narrative content. And playing music and gardening? Please.