I don't fully agree with any of these guys, even though they all have very good points. The balance is difficult, or we would see more games that actually had interactive stories. And based on what I've seen of Heavy Rain and on Indigo Prophesy, I doubt I would really like Heavy Rain as a game, but we definitely need that kind of development incorporated into other games to bring out more emotion.

I completely agree, solidine. As for the question of game play or story being more important, there is no simple answer considering both have to be at least decent for the game to be good (with the exception of some games needing no story at all - Left 4 Dead, Forza, etc). The game that comes to mind most when thinking of the role a story plays in a game is Pariah. I played that game for several hours, and the game play was proficient enough to pass for a first rate game, but it was a boring game. I couldn't bring myself to finish it due to severe boredom because the story was just not immersive. However, I have played some games with fairly pathetic game play just because the stories were good enough to capture my attention.

Rattleheadxyz: details from a movie are also easier to remember because everything happens in about an hour and a half to two hours where a game can easily take ten to twenty hours to develop the story.

I really don't see interaction as the biggest hurdle for telling the story. The hurdle, or limitation, is that most developers get sub-par writers and then expect the story to fit into some predefined environment with a predefined set of events or boss fights or other situations. That is not how movies are directed or books are written. An author does not come up with the setting and the climax of the story, set a publish date, and then start writing the rest hoping that it all fits together! So until the story is the first consideration of a game, it is not going to come close to its full potential. And I hate how people assume that good narratives and good game play are somehow mutually exclusive. Any developer that sets that kind of limitation on themselves is already setting themselves up to have a poor game in one respect or the other.

This is just silly. Who cares if games are not "traditional" or are not like Shakespeare? Movies have been around for a century, and how many of those compare to Shakespeare? If you randomly pick a few out as examples of story-telling, they'll probably be pretty dismal. But games have the potential to be very effective regardless of which examples they pulled out. It is quite obvious that the story is pretty lacking in games, but they also have great potential to bring emotion into the story while also catering more to each player's own experiences (through the way they play the game) than a movie or book. I've played games where I felt a real compulsion to help out certain people, real sadness (very temporary... just like in the movies) over the death of a character, and got angry at non-player characters. Anything that can be portrayed in a movie can be portrayed in some manner in a game. Some may have to be shown through cut scenes, but it is not laziness that dictates those scenes. The developers just need to have a clear understanding of how they want to tell the story.

1. Morrowind 2. Oblivion 3. Star Wars Battlefront 2 or Counterstrike or Battlefield 1942 (for some intense online action to give me some social exchange) 4. Halo 5. Halo 2