I'm so glad you agree with my hypothetical argument that video games can be art in the first place! My "colleagues" - superiors, really - all vehemently disagree, so I've pretty much given up on that topic with my kids.
I shouldn't derail your thread, so I'll keep this short - have you tried Spec Ops: The Line? It's Apocalypse Now and more. It's the closest we've come (as a video gaming community) to fully utilizing gaming as a medium for provoking an aesthetic response from the viewer.
I hadn't actually heard of it and now I ruined the ending(s?) by reading the wikipedia article. I also ended up reading
this article about the game. It kind of reminds me of something I wrote a ways back about the morality of actions inside a game, but this guy's got kind of a different take on the genre. Interesting.
Still, it sounds like this game is still a very bounded narrative. The dialogue is what moves the story forward, he says, but the dialogue is not really within the player's power. With games like this--no matter how good the story--we're still being led around like a bull with the bit through our noses. I want to see games push the boundaries of the possible actions that define the genres to give the player real agency in the game world.
Civ gives the player agency, but there's still a thick interface layer between the player and the experience. Skyrim is maybe a step in the direction I'm talking about. I've heard a lot of people say it's like playing a movie, but even so, someone is writing the story lines the player gets to experience, so its relationship to cinema is still what, say, a graphic novel is to a book--a different expression of the same modality. At some point, I think games will really graduate into their own and we'll see some really different stuff happening.
Anyway, you're not derailing the thread, the other game of civ I was playing did that. Fortunately, I just finished it up, so I can start to get my head back into
this game and move the story forward.
