This is probably a long shot but what encounters have any of you had with literareness in games...

Not OP, The Evil Within is pretty neat. I'm only halfway through but it's solid pulp horror. The premise is that a shared consciousness experiment has gone wrong and some police detectives are stuck inside a living nightmare. It plays like a slightly jankier Resident Evil 4 with stealth options. On second thought it's more like The Last of Us but fun and without its head up its ass.

see. Planet Escape: Torrent is easily one of the most overrated creations in the history of media. It's like the Beatles of video games. MGS2 is far more clever despite being mostly retarded and is at least fun enough to play that fans don't have to apologize for the parts where you actually press buttons.

Because nobody has ever hired a critically acclaimed author to write character dialogue for their games.

Bloodborne
Nier

*blocks your path*

A chesty nymph clutching a sword in some dragons lair. Yeah im expecting this to be real deep

Can't help but think that anything with a hot anime lady on it is just pandering and thus creatively bankrupt.

found the homosexuals
hot anime girls are Veeky Forums as fuck

Probably gonna get flak for this, so save your post for after you read the end, but I really love the way the Dark Souls series do it.

In these games the dialogue is so cryptic it might as well not be there. You come into the world precisely like your character: unknowing and powerless to the world surrounding you, stripped bare of your humanity in some eastern-ish metaphysical sense. And then you start exploring, and your only hope to gather what is going on is to do it as if you were the actual character, which is linking together pieces of information and clues spread around the game world. Of course the immersion has to break down at some point and that's where you have item descriptions as the main source for lore. Nevertheless, you still have to hoard equipment and carefully piece together the text. There's also story being told in the environment: areas you see in one game bear resemblance to areas from another, and you can then pinpoint stories in common, and also infer the fate of a character from finding parts of their equipment lying around in certain zones, etc.

Even gameplay is directly tied to lore, as every aspect of co-op and competition are ingrained in the "being a Soul" part. You collaborate with others to face hardships and it's actually a meaningful-to-the-plot contribution to their own pocket dimension. Thus there are NPCs which either help or invade you from other worlds, their own worlds, and the place where they pop are also clues to their own stories and motives.

With all that said, I don't think this is what most people would really classify as literature. At best it is a choose your own adventure book with particularly gruesome requirements for turning a page. I do love the story surrounding the series, but it's simply not told in a way that would fit the scheme of conventional literature, hence it has no proper "literareness". Not to mention it is built as an inward experience like a lot of Eastern Philosophy, so there's not much to be gained regarding storytelling really, i.e it would probably suck as a book like most games, because most of the fun goes on where YOU take the story.

Dark souls is just castlevania 3d done right. from openly admit the lack of plot is because they dont think it matters, same with armored core. this has been froms stance their whole existence, they didnt even want to do sequels to DS, they were just contractually obliged.

It's threads like these when I wish people like Roger Ebert were still alive.

Ebert was a hack with bad taste, why do you wish he was alive? so you could revel in some false sense of authority? literally just some fat nerd in the right place right time.

While this is true, their solution for not having a plot is much better than both trying to have one, and having a gray bland 3D model fight gray bland 3D models in a gray bland 3D model cube world. The same goes for King's Field that barely even had NPCs. Like I said, it's an inward experience, and actually I suppose this aspect is similar to literature: once you experience it, that experience is yours and the author has not that much to do with your further tempering with that experience.

your loss, desu

Alan Wake is a successful horror fiction writer and also the protagonist of a game named after him: Alan Wake.

>playing steven king fanfiction
ewwww

I thought the same thing for nier autofellatio, and while incredibly pretentious with the name dropping, there were definitely parts I enjoyed.

Planescape is almost unplayable.

t. PC gamer.

Video games and literature are two completely different mediums. Just because a video game may have a worthwhile narrative or may beautifully implement interactivity does not mean it has any genuine comparison to literature, and vice versa - those choose your own adventure books are poor for interaction and the closest to video game-esque literature is the dungeons and dragons manuals.

What could make games comparable or at least more elevated as a medium? A kind of (perhaps unique) intertextuallity maybe?

I don't think it necessarily needs to be comparable - video games works well as its own distinctive medium and can tell narratives in a unique way that borrows elements from cinema, music and literature while also being distinctively independent from those mediums - and as a medium video games is more elevated and respected nowadays than it was 10 - 20 years ago.