[burntoutfire]

Playing a game means mastering skills in a purely fictional world with purely fictional sets of rules and challenges. It doesn't translate into your life, expect in the most abstract way [1]. Whereas reading a newspaper, magazine or a book deepens your understanding of the world you live in.

[1] The flipside is that it can teach you bad habits as well. If the result of the game does not matter in any way, you have no incentive to try hard at it, and can just coast, turn the game off when you're frustrated etc. This is not how real-life is (coasting and difficulty avoidance don't work as well), so games can teach damaging habits. It's better in team multiplayer games, because in-game peer pressure can make you get out of your comfort zone.

[account42]

If you really think that games cannot teach you the same things as purely written words then perhaps you have a very limited view of what kind of games are out there.

[burntoutfire]

Games convey very simplistic ideas compared to the full extent of human thought, expressed in spoken or written form. It's usually way more washed down than cinema, which is already incredibly washed down.

Not to mention the benefit of say reading about your country's history, as opposed to the history of some ficitonal world in a video game - with history books, you're learning about the things which actually happened and have had a direct, large impact on your life and the world around you.

Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them), something that games are severely lacking (cue in people telling me about Nier Automata and one or two other story-based games which are approaching the level of a bad novel).

Most video games are spatially-oriented and are basically more sophisticated version of children playing tag, football or similar simple games focused around interactions in 3d space. And the ones that are not that, i.e. that try to be about humans and not simple spatial and temporal relationships, basically suck for the most part. It's clear that the medium is not meant for them.

[Vnnwa]

The thing is, Nier Automata doesn't try to be a novel. I mean, it's not even that subtle, game all but tells you that it tries to experiment with storytelling in the medium in the first 30 minutes.

Also, you sound extremely prejudiced and close minded: > Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them) How do you even argue with that? Can you somehow support this claim? Though from reasoning like this i can deduce that you must hate House of Leaves, and kinda understand why you dislike Nier Automata.

[ajmurmann]

Nier Automata is an interesting example! It touched on a lot of interesting topics and did so in a very creative way. At the same time I also feel that the game wasn't mindful of my time at all. The stretches between the interesting story elements were frequently separated by long, often-repeating stretches of fairly simple hack'n slack gameplay. I'd hold up something like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium though. But Disco Elysium is pretty close to an amazing book and doesn't do as creative work with the game medium as Nier does.