3. Filmic Comparisons
It does serve to point out that many games are taking influence purely from films, as for the most part some of the people making them were brought up on the classics of yesteryear. Uncharted is a love-letter to Indiana Jones, Mass Effect a tribute to all things Star Trek, and Grand Theft Auto V a ribbon-tipped arrow straight to the heart of Michael Manns Heat, amongst a cavalcade of titles all paying tribute in varying degrees of subtlety to the tropes of Western Cinema. If we forget the strides that gaming has made through interaction, player agency and authorship of a creative experience, and just take them as a collective work put together to tell a story similar to other narrative frameworks, whats stopping games from qualifying as a piece of expression in that way alone?