Now, though, I think games have found a lot more mainstream cultural appeal and the continued catering to power fantasies and the Star Wars/Trek and LOTR nonsense is getting a bit out of control. Look at games like Max Payne, Bioshock, Portal, Far Cry 2, and such. They're all superb games, but their handling of environments, setting, and “genre” make their experiences so unique that they end up being better games for it.

Hell, look at The Sims (and the rest of the Sim games and Spore); Maxis makes incredibly fun games out of regular, daily life. It's possible to put any genre or setting into a game, but sometimes it takes a unique game design to make it work.

Short cut scenes do a remarkable job of both infusing a player's actions with meaning while also serving as reward bookends for gameplay segments. I'm inherently against cut scenes since I think they serve to remove the player from the gameplay, but as the reward portion of effort/reward, they work quite well.

I do wonder what other inspiration you can think of though. As far as genre's go, there's non-fiction, plain fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, and futurism, which is often confused with science fantasy(Fallout is science fantasy, Mirror's Edge is more futurist. Both are sci-fi, but I digress). If it doesn't exist in real life, it automatically goes to SF or fantasy.

So it seems you must want more regular type fiction in games. I guess that would include historical fiction, which is seldom approached outside of WWII FPS and the various historical RTS games. Do we need more regular fiction, like dramas(Michael Mateas's Facade?), romance(there's a genre that would destroy me), or mysteries? I guess there's less of that sort of thing in games.

This isn't a particularly well organized comment/ramble. I hope it doesn't come off as critical. I'm just curious.

I'm a CS:Game Design major at UCSC, so I'm always interested in hearing game design philosophy.

Obviously, a book (whether in-game or not) should never become a substitute for discovery or interactivity. On the other hand, I think the notion that the video game is this completely different media that should eschew literature and cinema in order to be a pure gaming experience is.. snobbish? No, movies do not often pause and present a paragraph of text for the viewer to read, but I do not think we should restrict our definitions of media. Should a painting never display a line of poetry?

I know I am straw-manning your point a bit. I'll accept that – I just want to suggest that the biggest problem with movies/books in games is not that they are in games but that they suck. You know, the writing and movie-directing in Blizzard's games was compelling enough that I sometimes cheated through missions just to hear the dialogue and watch the cinematics. Yeah, I'm playing a game, but I still like movies and I enjoy reading. The main difference between storytelling in MGS4 and Starcraft is that MSG4 had horrible writing and poor cinematography.

In short, while games like Portal and Bioshock are great in their storytelling, I would not want every game to be that way. Sometimes, the best reward for pulling off a great feat of gameplay is not more gameplay but a stunning and engaging cinematic. Emphasis on the adjectives.