This is interesting! Sad, but that's the first unhelpful thing that comes to my mind. Obviously the only subsection I can really talk about is the Final Fantasy one. I found it especially interesting what you mentioned about visual storytelling and body language in the different games. I believe you are right about FFVIII having the most gestural storytelling in regular gameplaying mode. At the same time I am not sure what I think about the body language in FFIX or X. I think it's harder to say in X especially because there are so many short movies to convey important emotional events - maybe they do rely on that too heavily. It's an interesting thought.

One thing I want to talk about is possibly movies that don't tell as much of a story. I am not totally clear on the proper video game lingo, but I think what you are referring to are often RPG games - Half-Life II is an FPS, I think?

With regards to what owlmoose was saying, maybe part of the problem with people disliking video games is how such vast differences exist between video game genres and how "video game" refers to such a huge range of things. I mean, "video game" refers to so many different things. Take Bejewelled, World of Warcraft, SIMs, Grand Theft Auto and then the games you have chosen to discuss here. There's such a ridiculous range of games out there. Some of them are less artistic than others and some are less conscious of the message they are sending and are just trying to sell a product. Then there's the time investment - for games with a real story line it's possible you have to invest more time than reading a large novel. Maybe games aren't as accessible to people who already have no interest in doing anything but criticizing them.

Sorry that was maybe a massive tangent there, I thought of it because you mentioned "the usual kind with lots of cutscenes" and I wondered, *is* that the usual kind? What does constitute "usual" for a video game? I think it's really hard to say.

But I think it's super interesting that one of your main types of storytelling is TEXTUAL. I've been hearing a lot about education recently and learning and trying to put into practice the idea that literacy is about more than just reading books! It's about newspapers and television and movies and plays and comic books and the internet and video games and music and advertisements. Why is it so hard for people to understand this or to promote video games to kids when many of them do rely on a lot of text? It's a way to get disinterested kids to read. Video games have their own language and their own set of problem solving skills. Okay, I'm totally preaching to the choir so I'll stop now. :)