[TFeldt]

Originally Posted by viviena

Yet at the same time I don't think some gamers do themselves any favours by insisting that people who play The Sims 3, for example, aren't real gamers because such games don't require typical twitch or fast reaction skills.

I accept no personal responsibility, nor do I make any excuses for the dregs of the gaming industry. Happen to agree with you that the sims was a landmark achievement since it was one of the first truly massive stepping stones to get "regular people" into a deeper, more involved type of interactive fiction. You're welcome to disagree with me but I've always thought the sims was a non-linear evolution of the "choose your own adventure" type of books.

Nowadays, I tend to think that's it's not so much the story of a game that's important to me but rather how the story is executed. Treating a game as a story with interactive elements, like those Japanese visual novels, is tedious.

Ah, that's just beautiful. Via my (quite substantial) amount of posts in the this thread I've tried to convey two basic principles; non-interactive fiction does not translate well into interactive fiction, or vice versa, and the gaming industry has given up chasing licenses in favor of developing their own opuses since they understand the former fact.

Your comment is truly spot on. What would you say to the statement "the story is what is important in a book"? It makes sense, there isn't anything to a book beyond the story. But I'd like to change it somewhat into "the experience is what is important about a book". This, more generic description, fits even better with interactive fiction since there's more levels to it.

Despite the trollish behavior of some of the other posters in this thread I do agree with him about one thing, video games doesn't require as much imagination from the player as books do. But on the other hand it requires several layers of additional craftmanship to make everything mesh, or it'll be regarded as a failure. "Sure the graphics are great but the music is just horrific", "Good grief, look at that cheesy cutscene", "I'm getting motion sickness from the movement system", et cetera. When everything meshes it doesn't matter if one particular aspect is left out or not, the -experience- (as you underlined) is what is important. The lasting, overarching impression you get.

This is also what I was trying to get at in my original post where I claimed that there is in fact a market for book to game conversions, but they'd have to only license the world or the concept and not the plot (since non-interactive to interactive fiction just doesn't translate, sorry about repeating myself but I know of no shorter way to put it).

As for complaints about poor scripting, voice acting, etc... Well, gaming is still a very young medium compared to films and reading. Games are already much more sophisticated than ten years ago though, and as the budget and experience of making games grow, I'm sure games will become more sophisticated.

Touché. The written word has been around for several thousand years, movies for 133, games for 35 (if you're generous).