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LA Noire is just another sign that video gaming is maturing as a medium. As people become bored with games which are the equivalent of Star Wars and Commando, the main focus shifts away from violence and onto plot, theme and character development. It's good to see the rare games that take their cues more from literature than films.
Someone above mentioned Heavy Rain, which maybe wasn't very interactive, but had some fantastic characters and used pace and emotional weight to affect the participant. Bioshock was a great piece of science-fiction with the kind of plot twists you don't find in film now, because film-makers don't want to risk aliienating those viewers with short attention spans. Bioshock also lifted much of its theme of moral doubt from the work of Ayn Rand.
One video game reviewer expressed it well when he said, 'video games are still waiting for their Citizen Kane.'
As for ebooks becoming apps, or even blurring boundaries with books in the future: yes, I think that some certainly will. In fact, once most people have tablet computers (give it five years), we'll see a glut of them, just as we did with interactive CD roms when computers started using them. Look at Al Gore's recent app for a good example of how this will be done.
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