Theoretically, video games are the ultimate medium.

If you have the cash and support to make one, video games could be the ultimate medium.

You can just have sit down and play games, or you can make one with a heavy indepth story. Unlike movies, you can make a game as long as you want. You can deliver all the wow and action of movies while still maintaining the length of books.

Recently people have come up with better ways to integrate the story into gameplay like Uncharted and Call of Duty, so that eliminates the 4 hour cutscene problem.

Add all that up, and you could consider video games the ultimate medium.

If only someone would take advantage of that fact.

I agree.

ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.

I wouldn't call video-games the "best" or "ultimate", but they definitely have the most potential. But of course, they cost a crap load of money, so most game developers can't afford to be experimental with their games.

Well, no. To say that video games are a greater medium than cinema strikes me as the same as saying that cinema is a greater medium than literature. From the technical standpoint, there are a lot of advances that come with your improved technology. However in terms of their increased cost as technologies improve, there become more rules set by the studio, and more suits to please.

While movies and games both improve on the technology of literature, they each give up a good deal of that freedom. Literature can afford to cater to a niche. It's a book. It didn't cost much to make. A hollywood blockbuster or a triple A release don't have that luxury.

Depending on how you look at it, webcomics could be the ultimate medium. They're the one least hampered by social constraints. (Or, if you dislike the idea of Protection from Editors, books can provide more of a balance while still being cheap to write.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I knew this already.

I agree that video games can contain more diverse information than any other medium. But to play Devil's Advocate, video games probably have more of a problem with accessibility than any other medium: they require the physical ability to play them (I mean bodily ability, not access to electricity) and the skill to progress through them.

Literature is probably the most accessible. Even if you don't have the ability to read, you can have someone read to you — and translate, explain, etc. I guess you could make a similar argument for theater, possibly even film. But you can't play video games through another person.

We could generalize Protection from Editors to almost anything online, couldn't we?

edited 21st Apr '11 1:02:32 AM by newtonthenewt

She's playing with fire! He's not ready for Nibbly Pig!

I think the only way that will occur is if someone manages to make a virtual reality world where the player has a literal in-game body and experiences everything directly in person (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, hell even Co D) or give them the power to make and shape the world as they please (ex. Mine Craft, Black & White or any other world-building games).

And that instead of having pre-scripted lines or actions/events, the game works around your choices in real-time, for better or worse.

But of course by this point the game might be considered a bit too addictive or realistic for a person's own good, which would probably prevent it's invention even if the technology to create it ever came to fruition.

Hell, get a good enough bunch of roleplayers and enough free time, and you have the above one. I've been in one game where the players were all characters in the same city, with their own storylines, but degrees of cross-over. Because the GM would shift his focus around between player to player, the players not getting GM attention would just start chatting to each other. But all the player chat was in character, and discussing in-universe things. That's pretty much a nice, cheap way of delivering what you talk about above.

I think "most flexible" is a better adjective than "ultimate".

But otherwise, I agree completely.

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

Movies are kind of more expensive than games though, GTA 4 cost 100M USD, Avatar was 234M USD.

I doubt anything can be considered an ultimate medium though. Books are the least constrained, movies are the best visually, games provide some of the freedom of books while retaining most of the visual beauty of movies.

Live forever or die trying.

Theoretically nothing. There are thousands of things you can do with your voice alone, that get limited when you try to convert basic story telling into a video, just reading a book and letting your imagination run can do a lot more than any video game ever will. You can't change the rules of a video game as you see fit or force to conform to whatever you want it to be, it lacks much that traditional games like Hide and Seek or Freeze tag can provide.

Video games have advantages over other forms of entertainment too, but ultimate? No they are not the end all be all and never will be.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

@RP Genius's first post: I consider video games are more ultimate than movies to be equivalent to 'books are more ultimate than movies''

edited 21st Apr '11 12:22:24 PM by Enzeru

Relevant. Flexible as video games are, some stories simply don't work that well in that medium, but work extremely well in others. I mean Buried was an excellent film, but it would make one hell of a pointless game. Some stories rely so heavily on verbal narrative that they lose a lot of impact in a video medium at all — Lovecraft comes to mind, where you actually lose a lot of the sheer overwhelming dread, mystery, and imagination of the reader simply by showing any picture, much less the difficulties of visually displaying extraplanar weirdness whose nature is explicitly incomprehensible.

This is rather the exception to the rule, of course.

edited 21st Apr '11 1:23:38 PM by Pykrete

I think it's meaningless to compare video games to cinema, literature, or music... Video games are, well, games. The others aren't, they're forms of art. Not to say that video games can't be artsy; I just think there's a fundamental difference (interactivity!) between playing a game and, say, reading a book or watching a film.

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...

At the risk of getting into yet another "games as art" discussion, the differences are primarily in how information is presented and what demands are made of the audience than anything. For film, what's imposed on the audience is more third-person emotional involvement than anything; books force the imagination to be exercised in description and setting but can explore psychological issues in explicit depth; games are more a second-person experience.

edited 21st Apr '11 7:00:49 PM by Pykrete

There is no ultimate medium. Not when talking in general about storytelling. As said above with the Buried example; a story of a woman coming to terms with the fact that she's pregnant (to pull an idea out of thin air), would work great as a novel, would be acceptable as a film, and would be the dullest game you ever did play. A story about a man who could shoot lasers out of his hands and used this skill to fight dinosaurs in space (to pull other ideas out of thin air), would be the greatest game in history, a mindless action film, and a twelve page books.

Which isn't to say each medium can't explore deep ideas. Persona 3, for example, does a great job of exploring family relations, and says a lot about what family means. But there are just some ideas which work better within different mediums. You can have the ultimate medium for telling the story you want to tell, but not an ultimate medium overall. Consider as an example Alan Moore's vehement protest against the idea that Watchmen would make a good film. It wouldn't. It was of its medium, absolutely.

This has rambled more than it meant to. Blame the whiskey. My point in a nut-shell is that to speak of an ultimate medium removes all the subtlety from both mediums, and the stories we tell within them.

Computer games (interactive multimedia, to be pedantic) ARE the ultimate medium, since they form a perfect superset of all other media's capabilities, and add new ones (automatic interactivity, procedurality) on top of that. The same way, for instance, that movies are a superset of pictures, or songs are a superset of speeches.

I admit newtonthenewt's observation about accessibility is an interesting one, since a sophisticated game might require thousands in equipment, a sharp mind, and possibly even a vigorous body to experience as the author intended. In contrast, of course, a book is filthy cheap and dead simple, not to mention that it can be reduced to the point of Morse code being tapped out on your palm and lose nothing in the telling.

Eric,

I'm sure Nethack costed a pretty penny.

Otherwise I agree video games aren't "ultimate." I personally like them better and on a more consistent basis than any other medium, but I can't see how some books could be translated into games and still be just as good.

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If video games are truly the ultimate medium, that means no new medium will ever come to exist. Anything innovative from here on out would just be another kind of video game. Is this true, or is the possibility out there for new forms of artistic endeavour?

Everything is best in moderation.