That's hardly a movie though, is it!
That's exactly my point. It's the absolute other extreme of what is essentially physically the same medium. In reality, any option in between is possible. I find watching a season of, say, Buffy, on DVD very comparable to reading a book. You can add subtitles that write out every bit of spoken text in the series (nice for non-native speakers like me or my fiancee, or the bands that sing incomprehensibly), you can pause, you can continue whereever and whenever you like, you have a story that consists of several chapters and lasts for over 16 hours.
Chess no, but the other two examples do, I think. Fishing depends on watching the float for a bite.
But you can still walk away. At least, I did occasionally when I did some real fishing.
Flight Simulator is presumably about watching dials. Both are about waiting for AV feedbacks before responding, like pretty much all games. Act > respond > react. That engages different bits of the brain to movies or books where there's no action. There's only emotional or intellectual involvement.
In Flight Simulator you can fly from New York to, say, Tokyo in real-time. You have auto-pilot available. You could take off, fly for a bit, put on auto-pilot, go shopping / sleep, and then take it out of auto-pilot several hours later and eventually, land.
That'd be okay in an adventure game, but 90+% of games are action oriented. Adventure games are even a dying breed. Reading text and working out clues was something we used to do. If you're interrupting the action sequences for intellectual sequences, you're asking the player to have two different cooperative tastes. Games that have tried to mix up thoughtful puzzles with action gameplay have often come a cropper too I think. Much depends on the genre.
You're losing the point of what we were discussing, which is whether or not it was possible to recreate the experience of reading a book in the medium of games or movies - see lauris71's post before the post that you responded to.
This gets back to it a little:
They're two different activities that require different degrees of involvement in different ways.
And I disagree with that. There can be overlap. It's all about extremes again. If someone were to argue that the two are absolutely the same, I would disagree with them also. But if someone argues there is no overlap, then that doesn't compute either.
In all these cases, the requirement is emotional involvement with the characters. Tron was exciting because you were worried what'd happen and if they'd get away. Take away the rest of the story and just have bikes whizzing around, and few people would care to watch it.
Didn't you just prove my point? That was, in case you missed it the first time, exactly my point. A good story/background can make you emotionally involved in the simplest of games. See?
From that point on, you answer your own question. The story can provide the motive, the emotional involvement, that makes the simplest of gameplay matter on more than a simple act/react type of human interaction.
If you can get the player involved in the story and care about the characters, you could go on to do interesting things. I wouldn't spend 15 minutes of game time wading through virtual microfiche looking for clues unless I was feeling there was a point to it. If I cared about the kidnapped virtual-person I was trying to save, it'd be less of a chore.
In the ideal situation, you would have both the external motivation to want to complete the chore, and enjoy the actual chore. I.e. the story would enhance the enjoyment and intensity of the gameplay, by making you more vested in the results of your achievements. (Note that the latter is also achieved for some people simply by the Achievements part of Xbox Live).
Although games are at a huge disadvantage because of save games. There's no risk. If the kid dies, reload. If you can't find the answer within 5 minutes, look it up on the web. Taking control away from the author and placing it with the player makes managing the players emotional roller-coaster nigh on impossible, I'd imagine.
Well, sure, any kind of punishment for dying, or even saving your game (as some games have done) is a negative way of making the player more invested in the results of his actions. It makes me think of Leisure Suit Larry, where dying was always so funny, and the game itself reminded you to 'save early, save often'.
The death of the free typing system in those games is part of the reason why adventure games are dead today, by the way. At least I think so.
There was nothing more thrilling to me as a young kid then finding out how the different Sierra games responded to different 'phrases'. From the 'tut-tut' in Kings Quest, to the '... you too' in Larry, it was always really neat, and gave you a sense of freedom, and you felt you were interacting with someone intelligent, even if it was the game's designer ...
