/lit/ - Literature

>>17823029
>>17824440
Pathologic, no other games come close to being really artsy without being trite.
Make sure you play HD, and all three of the character routes before you play 2; only brainlets who never finish the first game think that 2 is a remake and not a sequel.

>>17380843
This is beyond retarded, don't do this. I wouldn't recommend playing the first game at all, since 2 is practically a remake of the first game sans 2 routes. Play Pathologic 2, because it is genuinely a good game that doesn't suck ass to play, and maybe go back to Pathologic 1 to play the other character routes if you're still interested.

>>17017043
Right now there's nothing video games can do that can't be done in another medium. The biggest thing they have to offer is a sense of interactivity, but right now the technology isn't good enough to duplicate the level of interactivity you would get from a real-life performance with human actors. "Interactive storytelling" in games is really just picking different paths down a pre-determined flowchart. The only difference between that and reading a book is the order in which the audience experiences events, and unless the game programmer is determined to prevent their players from playing the game more than once the audience will eventually go down every path of the flowchart and experience everything, at which point the sense of interactivity is completely lost. The other option is to do some kind of interactive art performance in an online multiplayer game, but I honestly don't know how that would work or what advantage it would have over a performance in real life.
There are some well-written games out there made by smart people, but there's nothing in them that wouldn't work just as well in a book or something similar. I love Pathologic, as do a lot of people on this site, but the reason it's so good is because the creator originally came up with the concept without a medium in mind and only made the game after adapting it as a story, a roleplaying game setting, and a play. Same goes for other games people like for artistic reasons. MGS could have been an action movie without losing anything, Planescape could have been a fantasy book, etc. Some people argue that having to "live through" the experience of a character by playing them in a game is a key part of the experience, but to me that just sounds like window dressing. A good writer can create the same feeling with words alone.
In the end the best games out there, from an artistic point of view, are good despite their being games. I'm pretty sympathetic to games, but the more I think about it the more I feel that they're an artistic dead end and that the medium doesn't have much potential in its current state. There's no real reason for an artist to make a game rather than a movie or a book.

The counterpoint to all of this would be to think of video game design as architecture rather than literary art. I haven't really thought about this, but it seems like a more productive comparison. A lot of maps for FPS games are architecturally interesting in the way they're designed to make the player go a certain direction or focus on one thing in particular. It's also kind of interesting to see what kind of buildings and structures kids who would never have the resources to building anything in real life can come up with.