Bigboi500
Let me unpack and answer first statement. then the next.
As for the exact same, the fundamentals of each medium specifically the time it has to effectively convey it's intended message(s) is different. books could take weeks (War and Peace, Les Miserable just as two examples of very long classic literature). a movie usually has about 90 - 160 minutes to get it's story and message(s) across, a song about 2-5 minutes. A game could take a few hours or weeks but here's the big difference. games are interactive, and in the most basic of sense a game just has to be a form of video-interactivity for the viewer/player for it to technically be considered even a video game.
But when you think of super long games, something has to occupy that time, so what is it? it's combat. Notoriously long games like in RPG's, it's basically abnegation level-grinding. There is no character development in that. It's something i noticed in the criticism for Bioshock infinite from Spoony to the Polygon reviewer roundtable discuession, that the one part no one liked was the combat sequences.
Everyone was fully engaged in the drapins of Columbia and the relationships between the characters, that for the most part the combat was just there as filler. Remember - and i apologize if you haven't played it - there is effectively no combat for the first 45 or so minutes in that game.
and this ties back to what i was talking about earlier about asking for something that really isn't there. strip away the explosions and combats from a video game and you in effect get a visual slightly-interactive movie with all the character development you want. I mean if you applied that to say Mass Effect 3, you basically got yourself a "choose your own adventure" tale. A rather good one i'd argue, but still a choose your own adventure.
That is fundamentally the crux of games. people - on game forums - are wanting these thought provoking stories and settings that stir conversation, but it's juxtapose with gun-play/magic/sword combat filler.
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As for your second statement, i do NOT believe that to be true at all. whether your triple AAA, indie or independent all together, you can make your own game. No one has to or should have to make that road easy for you to make your own vision come true in game form, but you can. the tools are there, the opportunities are there, you simply have to work at it and achieve it. and CarnegeHeart already pointed out just a few games that already broke the mold that were both well received critically and financially successful. That trend will continue, so long as people actually spend their hard earned money on those games. because writing about how much we loved xyz game but didn't actually buy ourselves doesn't do jack to help further those sorts of games. Nevermind that i DO think it is too much to put it upon an entire other demographics (in this case the mostly straight, mostly white, mostly male industry) to have to make games for everyone else and in between because of a loud minority on the internet and their game websites editors.
The issue is I think - especially for game veterans and older gamers - is a matter of being jaded because you've played so much already. Its why you also see music and movie snobs online as well. You've seen the tropes so many times, that they become more then a little annoying. For the jaded that is.
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The cold hard truth is this, for the masses. Transformers (the movie) was amazing. For the geeks and those who loved Transformers. they unanimously hated it. But this has been true since the beginning of story telling. simple exciting tales entertain the masses, more cerebral and thought-provoking happen less often and are less well known by the masses (unless they make it mandatory reading in k-12 schools). Like everyone knows The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye but damned if anyone actually cared or really liked it or actually wanted to think any deeper about it's story elements then what was absolutely necessary to complete homework.
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Which while i've just mentioned Great Gatsby and having read it, and will go see the movie, i can guarantee you the movie will miss or downplay key themes in the movie primarily because of the amount of information that is conveyed on a piece of paper is different then what is conveyed on a still image screen and it only has about 90-160 minutes to tell you the entire book's story. As best as it can, the 'movie' that played in your head is always better then what you end up seeing from someone else.
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Which is why i say again, maybe what people are asking from games simply isn't gonna come from your traditional game. You should look to playing To The Moon, and not fret about some indie guys game because it's got chicks with massive boobs and guys with unbelievably large muscles. Buy Last of Us and Remember Me, instead of fretting about how the latest Call of Duty knocked both of them out of the park in terms of sales and global mindshare, or - as we are both avid gamers - keep an active eye out for games that deserve recognition and call them out.
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but for me, in terms of stories told-to-you-explicitly in games? i'm not counting on it, everything for me is based on experience of play and adventure in whatever story setup it may be in. Precisely because a story-heavy game has to be reconciled with bloody/interruptive combat filler. You have to be able to reconcile that, and the only way i see how is through making it an experience, not an info-dump.
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Because in that case, might as well read a book or watch the HBO series.
Because the shallow stories we see in a lot of pop culture mediums isn't going away. in fact it's not even new. it's always been with us.
P.S. As GamingQueen wrote in another thread, ExtraCredits also did a piece of Non-Combat Gaming, but as good as is it, just reflect on it for a bit and hopefully you'll see what i mean by the problem you find in traditional games to begin with.and what it allows/limits for story telling opportunities.
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