Granting for the moment that it's a good interactive movie, I just don't understand what the interactivity adds to the experience. It seems to me that the player can only identify with the character to the extent that he doesn't reflect on what he's doing, and the end result doesn't strike me as being any different than what a choose-your-own-adventure book could accomplish. What artistic value is added by giving the player the ability to choose whether or not the character takes the left or the right fork? This is to everyone - this is just a point I've never understood. I look at narrative media as making tradeoffs between identifying with characters and understanding characters. A book or movie can tell you what the character is thinking, but in so doing they create distance between the experiencer and the character, or they can let the experiencer substitute his own thoughts for the character's, but this often leads to moments of realignment where the character does something that the player doesn't expect. The strength of games, to my mind, is that they can break out of this by allowing the player to identify with the character while not letting the character do anything that the player doesn't expect. However, the sort of weak interactivity in something like MGS is limited to meaningless decisions and to tests of skill in order to see the next cutscene, and I just don't see what that adds.
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