08-03-2004, 03:51 PM
There is no amount of reading in any game that's comparable to a book. Even a comic book has more to read. It's not that there is no reading in games, it's that there is no need for it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture is worth a thousand stills, and an interactive picture is worth a thousand of those.
Visual violence needs no descriptions, and you can have things like complex martial arts fights, since every detail of the action can come through. Whereas written violence isn't as intricate as visual violence. It just can't be. There's a pace to maintain, and parsing long descriptions slows that pace to a crawl. With words, the violence is all in your head, minus the few defining actions that get described. This is a double-edged sword however, since what the reader gets out of it is user-defined; a disturbed mind will get a more disturbing scene playing out in their head.
Personally, I find that books create the most desire to take part in the events.
::PostScript::
Text based games do exist, and I realize this. However, they are such a minority, that they are not included in the scope of modern games.
Visual violence needs no descriptions, and you can have things like complex martial arts fights, since every detail of the action can come through. Whereas written violence isn't as intricate as visual violence. It just can't be. There's a pace to maintain, and parsing long descriptions slows that pace to a crawl. With words, the violence is all in your head, minus the few defining actions that get described. This is a double-edged sword however, since what the reader gets out of it is user-defined; a disturbed mind will get a more disturbing scene playing out in their head.
Personally, I find that books create the most desire to take part in the events.
::PostScript::
Text based games do exist, and I realize this. However, they are such a minority, that they are not included in the scope of modern games.