My kids convinced me to try out a couple of those old final fantasy games from the 90s. As someone who studied Kabbalah I was intrigued by the fact that they named a character Sephiroth, although the character really had nothing to do with the name or concept. Anyway, I was already old so I didn’t have the same emotional connection (except when that girl was killed) because neither the writing nor the realism was at a level I hadn’t seen before. It definitely would have hit me hard at 13, though. Really hard.

Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.

The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.

Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.

I often find the voice acting to be interminably slow and distracting and immersion breaking somehow. You are just waiting for the voice actor to slowly emote it all. I like how Morrowind did it when questing. Some flavor voice to set the mood and then great writing you read. Full voice acting for important parts and scenes.

Surely an article can cover a process end-to-end, just as a video can focus on only a critical part. Do you mean that the medium of video encourages the author to be more thorough?

It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging with the material. How far are you going to get in a field, if you're reliant on having everything explained to you in simple terms.

Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:

"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.

"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.

In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.

There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.

Hear! hear!