Games and Movies

Schindler's List

A picture and a song can only do so much. It can try its best in being expressive but its limit is determined by its lack of potential, knowing that it could have the essential half

Movies are best at letting you be engrossed in a story.
Games are best letting you be immersed in an experience.

One can't do what the other does best.

Games are about interactivity. Feeling like you're there. Movies let you witness a life right in front of you. Games are overall superior in that it can branch between doing what games do best and diving into territories of film. Having stories, characters, ideas, and messages that you'll love and cherish.

While games can go a path of film-like practices, it'll feel more and more like a movie and less of an actual game.

The flowchart of all the possible paths the player can take
 in one of the many chapters of Detroit: Become Human

It's never a black and white thing when it comes to games. "Is this a game or is this a movie?" comes to mind. An example of this is Detroit Become Human. A game that goes at great lengths to make itself feel like a movie, that one can claim it to be an interactive movie and not a game. But a movie can never make you feel like you have an effect on the story. The only way a movie can be non-linear isn't through the decisions of the viewer, rather than the way it is presented. Even so, games that are inherently linear in its story can still make you feel like you impact a lot of it simply just by being able to interact and essentially exist within the environment.

There's also the guarantee in movies that it'll provide some sort of cohesive narrative experience, whereas games tend to have freeform content tailored to how you would want to experience it. 

Sometimes to a fault of diverging away from what the developers had in mind. But that's always inherent to games as they are meant to be driven by the players. If they weren't, it would, as mentioned before, lie on a spectrum between an interactive movie and a game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing either. It just proves how flexible games can be as a medium if you're willing to be flexible on what you can define as games per se.

Goldshire Inn from World of Warcraft

On all fronts, games are all about sparking imagination with interactive creativity. Whether on making them or playing them. It doesn't even have to have its own story when the user experience relies mostly on them creating their own, whether with others through its social aspects or through their own imagination. In a sense, the games themselves become a medium for the user to create their own art for themselves and for others.

They are given the tools to create their own fun, whilst movies provide a more laid-back viewing of someone else's work and the tale they want to tell in a cohesive, tight package, focusing more on the art of narrative and harnessing the audience's empathy, hope, and willingness to experience the new and different. Whether they be outlandishly entertaining or depressingly desolate. They are given the liberty to have no say in the matter and judge and immerse themselves in a work in its truest and most unaltered form.

Ratatouille