This song makes me cry. It's so beautiful. I would also like a Totoro plz.

@DaveDavies: The point. you have missed it.

I'd like to point out, that for all the hoo-rah and hooplah displayed here, there is a very distinct difference between wanting to kill someone, and actually killing them.

But how will it look in 3D?

@Gigi: "MAYBE YOU'D BE HAPPIER IF YOU DIDN'T THINK SO MUCH!"

@Ben F.: Under no circumstance am I claiming that any of those god-fucking awful Resident Evil movies are better than their game counterparts. What I am arguing is that any statement of philosophy or humanity that could be explored through videogames could be better explored through the medium of film, simply by…

@RealmRPGer: That's the problem though. Games by their nature are about granting agency to the unitary player actor. The more freedom you take away from the player, the less of a game it becomes. At their core games are simulations, which are themselves little more than imitations of real life.

@Orionsaint: No, a game cannot. Cutscenes do not. A game is the gameplay. The rules and parameters governing a game cannot communicate a specific authoral opinion.

@caster: Caster, who is the author in any other artistic form? The artist is the author.

The sheer number of games that I buy from Capcom nowadays. They really make good stuff.

@JABB: I think the difference is the trust gap. With the film, book, or movie, the elements of narration are entirely within the purview of the central author. The only degree of trust that the author requires is that the audience will sit through the entire sitting.

@Orionsaint: The capacity to communicate a specific authoral opinion.

@Smidget: Very well, even if videogames are to be understood as a hybridized medium - a perpetual marriage of two different forms, visual and gameplay, like the musical is music and theatre - it still speaks to the underlying weakness of the rules and objectives being antithetical to dictating a distinct authoral…

@The Squid: The difference is the developers are relying upon other storytelling techniques all the way through the entire production. They're offsetting the inherent inability of the gameplay to hold any statement of philosphy or art by buttressing it with alternative means of artistic expression.

@RealmRPGer: I'm going to lay it out then. In order for something to be art, it must communicate the unitary opinion and philosophy of the creator.

@JABB: I think the latent difficulty with games as an artistic medium is that games are built upon the player being the solitary author. Since an artistic medium requires the capacity to communicate the author's full central vision, the inherent fluidity of games run against deeming them capable of maturing into an…

@kyzur: Fuck dude, thanks for the TP spoilers. At any rate, Mass Effect presents its storytelling primarily through interactive cutscenes. They might be interactive, but they are still cutscenes. Which means that as storytelling methodologies they remain in the camp of things taken from cinema.

@Ironfungus: I could argue it's not art. The core components of that game were combat and brushwork. Neither of those components communicated anything about the larger status of human society or any sort of profound higher statement.

@WolfieXIII: While all mediums have their own examples of great and poor utilizers of the medium, the structural flaw that games have going against them is that they simply do not hold authoral ideas and contents well, if at all. It's not a matter of shoddy authors (though there are many, fuck you Michael Bay), but…

@WolfieXIII: "I think you may be blind to deeper meanings when you are part of them, you might be able to emphasize with them on a big movie screen as an observer, but I don't think you can deal with it as part of the experience."