Because Rammite for some reason locked us out of a really cool discussion I decided to just make a thread about it
To continue where we left off:
Games are a medium just like films and music and books are. If a game makes use of the elements that are presented by games, it has the right to be a game. The same goes for films and books: a book can't do action sequences well, a film can't do long dialogues well.* The power of games as a medium is that it gives the player a(n illusion of) choice and can motivate it through gameplay
-Stanley Parable is a piece about choice in games. It HAS to use choices the player makes or the message is lost. Therefore it has the right to be a game (even though I didn't like it)
-Gone Home is a story about a lesbian woman running away from home. Everything it did could just as well been done in a film, at a better pace, at a more reasonable price (and it already has the length of a film as well). There is not a single moment the gameplay pushes you forward; you literally wheel from one wad of text to the other.
The only reason Gone Home is a game is so that it can exploit the abysmally low standards games have for storytelling. If it was presented as a film, noone would have given a shit since the story has been done a a dozen times a dozen years ago and a dozen times better. And don't even get me started about how it would've been received as a book.
*With action sequences I mean "the kind of action sequences you see in films". You know, zip zappitee boop explosions swords fighting pew pew. Action sequences don't work that way in books. A very good example is the last Harry Potter film's fight versus Voldemort; in the book they basically just stare at eachother for half a day with a lot of inner monologue before finally firing a shot, in the film it's this long slowmotion shot with sparks flying everywhere. For dialogues, in books you can easily have two characters just talk to eachother for several pages, in a film you can't just do face shots of two people going back and forth talking to eachother for half an hour straight. I guess it boils down to that films can use a lot of visual action, but also HAVE TO use visual action or it becomes stale and weird, while books can focus more on inner monologue, which is often hard to visualize in films.