>Some AAA studios subscribe to the idea that games can deliver the maximum emotional impact in a similar way Hollywood does: By using actors in heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to. Instead of playing to their medium's strengths, these studios go through great pains to emulate what Hollywood gets naturally: emotive characters, good looking lighting, spectacular locations. It's a very literal attempt to imitate another established, successful medium, and because it gets some results, it's popular, despite the fact it's very expensive and brushes aside many of the benefits that games get naturally.
Games can be much more immersive than movies can. You can much more easily pretend to be the protagonist. By going down this route games lose some of the advantages of, say, arcade games, but they gain others and are generally not at a disadvantage compared to movies.
It's not immersive the moment your character does or says something you don't want to do.
It's the antithesis of immersive. Seconds ago I could strut where I wanted, chop who I wanted and tea bag who I wanted.
And then suddenly I am forced to watch a cut scene with some super slow speaking voice over artist, because no-one gets to the fucking point in computer games.
Sometimes it works. More often, it does not.
That is the point he is trying to make.
I do like getting into the role of the good guy, there are greaat cut scenes, but it's ultimately a cheap gimmick with the game author stealing agency from the player. Every now and then something happens and you're all like, you what?
That's the biggest difference between WRPG and JRPG.
JRPG's don't tend to try and put you into the shoes of any characters, and instead you just learn to care about the characters the way you would reading a book or watching a movie.
You don't need to be AAA to be interactive. Plenty of indie games have compelling characters and immersion in spite of (or because of?) their lower fidelity.
Hell, many AAA games stray away from interactivity in favour of awe-inspiring, non-interactive movie sequences, railshooter level designs, et cetera.
>heavily scripted sequences to tell the story of someone else that the player/viewer relates to.
I think one of the strengths of videogames is that you can make your own story. Heavily scripted voiced-acted videogames go against that because they force you to go a certain path.
Most games guide you neatly through a bunch of hoops; you create your own experience, but not your own story or anything like it, in most cases. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the experience of playing a game like Journey is very rewarding, even emotionally engaging. But you discover the story rather than create it nonetheless, it's just not as linear as heavily scripted games.
Games are an interesting storytelling medium, but stories are much more than variations on the order in which plot points are hit. The biggest issue is motivation - why characters (maybe including you) act as they do. In most free-range videogames the characters are very transactional; they want something and enlist the player to get/do something. In turn, players collect items or set game flags that allow them to defeat antagonists in contests of skill or force. But it's not really practical to interact with characters by appealing to love, greed, loyalty, arrogance etc. in order to motivate them to behave differently, so videogame stories can't do dramatic comedy or tragedy at present, although you can of course have slapstick or situational comedy, and you can have sadness or gloom. But the general lack of permadeath and the reflexive nature of AI are still a limitation.
>But it's not really practical to interact with characters by appealing to love, greed, loyalty, arrogance etc. in order to motivate them to behave differently
You can do something like that in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can have a cybernetic augmentation that lets you read microexpresions and do voice analysis. Then it tells you if the character you are talking to is more likely to be persuaded by flattery, assertiveness, bribery, intimidation and so on.
It ends up being little more than a gimmick, because being a modern high-budget game with impressive actors (they do good voices and their face expressions are so realistic that you don't need that cybernetic augmentation if you know how to read expressions in real life), it would be too expensive to have the kind of huge conversation trees that old style text-based computer games have.
Quite so. I have some ideas about how to do it but they're pretty abstract and I'm not sure you could offer the sort of consistent gameplay experience that AAA titles are offering to players, os the first games to do this successfully will likely be commercial failures.
Games can be much more immersive than movies can. You can much more easily pretend to be the protagonist. By going down this route games lose some of the advantages of, say, arcade games, but they gain others and are generally not at a disadvantage compared to movies.