I think a lot of why games struggle to reach the stature of a film or a novel is that both films and novels are massive undertakings that can be prototyped in t

I think a lot of why games struggle to reach the stature of a film or a novel is that both films and novels are massive undertakings that can be prototyped in their entirety by a single person. The reason a great novel can be written with tens of thousands of images and ideas is because written fairly cheaply. And film can be shot fairly simply. You can write several pages, or film several scenes in a single day. Video games are slowly getting there, but historically it requires days and days and days just to get a single facet of a game on a screen. You can't create a fully realized scene in a day the way you can on a page. This isn't going to be true forever. We refine our programming toolkits every year. We draw ever closer to the time where you could sit down and write a page of prose-like code with dozens of references, and have all of those references appear fully realized on a screen. We're just not there yet. It's like we were trying to make a great film but we haven't even invented the video camera yet, so we need to build a mechanism that makes every change in the frame by moving around animated elements. Basically, our current video games are the software version of the Zoetrope: https://jellygraph.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/early-moving-image/ https://jellygraph.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/early-moving-ima... And actually, the vast majority of programmers don't even believe that rapid, short-hand programming is even possible. Whenever the idea of regular people programming comes up there is a stampede of programmers claiming that programming is so complex and arcane that it will never be as accessible as writing or shooting video. I disagree, but that gives you a sense of how far we are from parity with film and print.