I mostly agree with you, yet the visual and musical experience that movies can deliver is something books lack. Sure you conjure up lovely visuals and sound in your mind while reading a book, yet it doesn't hurt to see someone else's vision now and then. Plus I have no clue how you would make a book out of movies like Baraka.

Books are imo closer to games than movies are. You live with a game for a while just like books (or even many years with an epic sage like the wheel of time or making your own stories in an mmorpg), while a movie is almost always consumed in one go. Stories in books keep going when I'm not reading, just as how a video game world stay alive in my head.

The impact a movie can deliver in 2 hours is pretty amazing though. Games are more like mini series, always at risk to be too drawn out. Final fantasy and TLOU would work perfectly fine as a mini series. If done well, they'll have a bigger impact too on an emotional level, although less off a connection to the world which you get by exploration. As for feeling connected to the characters, that's always a hit and miss with games. With books and movies you live with the characters and imagine being in their shoes. In games you are put in their shoes, but for me that always starts a struggle between what I want to do and what the game allows me to do. In a movie or book I simply think, well that's a dumb thing to do. A game forces me to make that stupid move, the latter is worse.

Not sure your logic with the 2nd point is really the greatest. That is just like saying try fitting the entire series of Breaking Bad into a 2-3 hour video game.

Video games can certainly tell good stories but as Jonathan Blow elaborates, "cutscenes interrupted by gameplay bits that get you to the next cutscene, pretty much sucks".

Judging by some of the posts in this thread, I get the feeling some here have not read the article and just read the article's title. Blow's not saying you can't tell a good story via video games, he's saying that most times video game storytelling relies on the aforementioned formula which in his opinion "pretty much sucks".

That quote is taken a bit out of context. What he means is that most pretty much all of the story in games are told during cutscenes, i.e. when the player is not actually playing, just watching. Generally, if someone just pasted the cutscenes together you'll have the full story in pretty much all it's details. In other words, the gameplay itself has little to no effect to the story.

What sucks doing this is that gameplay and story pretty much interrupt each other constantly until the end. Especially if there are loads of cutscenes with just short bits of actual gameplay. 

Thinking of it, this might actually be an interesting, yet possibly good way to make a movie based on a videogame: Just cut out all the playsections and paste the cutscenes together and voilà: Full movie done with minimal effort and budget

Hence the third point haha. What I meant to say is that a video game writer can arguably create a - what's the right word - engrossing story, because he/she has more time to play with.

Good points. I chose TLOU and FFX because they did a great job of inobtrusively nosing the player in one direction. True, a movie can do many things that a book and game cannot. But I prefer those three mediums to be separate and distinct anyway.

Videogames are way behind cinema and literature, that´s how it is. Most of them have shitty stories, but people have a terrible criteria so any blockbuster shit looks gold to them.

There are some brilliant exceptions though, videogames can be an awesome way to tell stories, but for now, they are not.

This guy needs to get off his hipster high horse and finish The Witness.

Yes, because every movie is a masterpiece, right?

somebody needs to make him play braid.