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Games As Transformative Works
Deepa Sivarajan sends word that the journal Transformative Works and Culture has published an issue that focuses on games, containing a variety of articles which examine how games interact with modern culture. One essay takes a look at how developers gain an understanding of the systems and structures that drive gameplay, and another discusses motivation and "participatory culture" in games that have a substantial degree of user design involvement, such as mods and addons. There's also an evaluation of how the enthusiast press affects the perceived value of games. The issue includes game-related book reviews and interviews, which can be found at the bottom of the full list of articles.
If you compare World of Warcraft to Finnegan's Wake, I'll compare Ico to a kitchen book.
being a part of the story rather than simply observing it.
But that is exactly where games today fail at. The player isn't part of the story, he is a passenger in a roller coaster ride. Giving him not only the non-interactivity of a book or movie, but also all the restriction that come from being locked to the viewpoint of a single character and of course the whole immersion breaking parts of pre-scripted events, bad AI and bad user interfaces.
As a medium, video games have the potential to go further, much further than that.
I don't disagree with that, after all everything from Tetris to the Holodeck falls into the 'game' category, so there is plenty of room left to explore. But so far games have at best scratched the surface of their potential, leaving a lot to be desired.
Complex and deep in what way? It seems as if you mean in terms of story and character development. But what about in terms of the complexity of other things like say troop movement in war or something? The battles in something like Civilization not to mention the hardcore war games are a lot more complex and deep than anything in any film or book.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I've had plenty of games that were totally satisfying in terms of interaction...
So have I, that doesn't mean that I don't see the inherent limits games today have.
The claim was that games offer richer interaction than other forms of personal entertainment (e.g. books, films, music, etc.)
No, the claim was that they offer "richer forms of entertainment" due to interaction. Now one can have of course different definitions of "rich", but for me its mainly the amount of variety in terms of what stories can be told and I see plenty of more of that in movies and books then I see in games.
Games are simply for most part a matter of "There are monsters, go kill them". Even the good games, while they might have better storys and dialog, follow the same underlying mechanics and are still not far away from Space Invaders. A large part of that is because the interaction is extremely primitive and no good for actual storytelling, at best it can be used to trigger a pre-scripted story event, but it does little to let an interesting story evolve out of actual gameplay.
There are of course a few exceptions with things like The Sims, which allow a rich set of actions and which allows dynamic stories to evolve, but then its still kind of at the level of mix of slapstick comedy and soap operas at best and doesn't get all that much deeper at this point in time.
The point I am trying to make isn't that books or movies are somehow better, but that the interactive parts of games doesn't really help that much when it comes to storytelling, in fact it often does exactly the opposite.
To phrase it another way, there has yet to be a single game that gets me emotionally involved due to its interactive parts. It just doesn't happen. The involvement comes due to cutscenes and predefined sequences, but not due to my own doing and those games that get close, just to often spoil it due to bad AI, stupid NPCs or simple save/reload cycles that can undo any dramatic event that happened.