I love video games but I doubt their will ever be a video game that can tell a compelling story like Hotel Rwanda, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Pianist, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and hundreds of other stellar movies and even if video games come close they can't do it in the same amount of time on the average of around two hours or less.

Not without sacrificing gameplay.

The comparisons between the two must be stopped.

Even comparing music to novels, or paintings to poems makes more goddamn sense, at least these are all part of the passive media.

Video games = radically different from every other form of media.

Video games can only tell cinematic stories if they stop being video games, getting interrupted with traditional film scenes, but that's like carving The Raven on top of the canvas of Mona Lisa, and claiming that it is superior to both traditional paintings and poems.

Hmmm. . . maybe the stories won't be as "good" or whatever, but if you allow them to, the stories can have just as great of an emotional impact on you. IMO of course.

They can, but they haven't done so yet. But that's more about writing than anything else these days, because we have seen games that can deliver great storytelling, they just need the stories to back it up.

I've been touched by some games - a special few - just as deeply as I've been touched by any movie.

So I guess my answer is yes, they can be as compelling.

Not even close, there hasn't been a single game where the emotion is somehow different than "oh cool" or "that sucks." There hasn't even been a fraction of emotion in any game as there has been in movies like Requiem for a Dream. Not even close.

This seems needlessly reductive, especially when it's based on the necessarily narrow band of your own experience.

Why do they have to hit that level though? I can tell you I care A LOT more about Alex Vance than I did about Duece Bigalow.

I have played far more games than I have seen movies, and even with said limited experience in movies it is painfully apparent that video games are completely outmatched.

@commonman

We're comparing the best here from each group. Because I can tell you even Scary Movie 4 was better than games like GoW when it came to story.