Doesn’t everyone just hit escape as soon as a cut scene starts?

> Sooner or later, almost everyone I talk to brings up the radically different cultural status of games and books

This is why we can't have good things. Too many people are stuck behind the status debate, and in particular caring about status also means protecting norms that might not be beneficial to one's art.

Basically, caring about being high brow is IMHO in opposition to being creative and innovative. It can be in small or big ways, but that happens at some level I guess.

The more interesting debate to me is where the money is: it's a lot easier to work in a field that can sustain creators, and if the money is in games, game creators will outlast the other field creators.

It's interesting how exactly this seems to parallel the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s-1960s sucking writers out of the rest of the world to work on scripts. The same risk/reward profile, the same looking down on the mass medium, the same blackhole of work if the rest of the massive project doesn't work out...

One of my personal favorite examples is Seth Dickinson, who wrote some of the lore for Destiny, including the Book of Sorrow and Marasenna in-game lore books, which are IMO some of the best parts of the universe.

He then went on to write The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I enjoyed a lot, and more recently Exordia - which is amusingly similar in themes and specific plot elements to the Book of Sorrow and really feels like Seth went "wait I wasn't done with that yet".

One of my favorite current authors is Peter Watts. His Blindsight is absolutely sublime and insightful, and I reread it frequently (and get more out of it each time).

Apparently he's written for Crysis and his next book is on backburner because Video Games actually pay rent :-).

One of my favorite video games of all time is the Western CRPG Betrayal at Krondor, set in the Riftwar Cycle universe as written by the relatively well-known fantasy author Raymond E. Feist.

The deft writing in that game is my go-to example for how to avoid that dime-store novella quality "purple prose," that you see so much in D&D fiction, and it easily holds its own against strong contenders in the writing category (Disco Elysium, Baldur's Gate, etc.).

Fair warning if you decide to go play it: spellcasting in the game is almost stupidly OP (cough Skin of the Dragon cough). Still great fun, but the combat is by far the weakest aspect of the game.

"Phew, this novelist career is too unstable! I know - I'll become a video game writer instead!"

I very much enjoy single player rather than multi.

The plot twist at the end of Crysis, when you don’t realize there was an intelligent purpose to a game mechanic… was an absolutely unforgettable moment. I don’t want to put any spoilers… something you took into the entire game suddenly becomes extraordinarily important at the end.

Only a great novelist could’ve put that together.

This is a recurring punchline in Apple's Mythic Quest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythic_Quest

Marc Laidlaw had a number of novels published before and after going to work for Valve and doing the Half Life thing.

"The Third Force" novel and the associated game "Gadget" are probably not well known - but if you liked Myst you might like them. It's a bit more of a visual story than a puzzle game - a bizarre psychological/psychedelic story with stunning for the time graphics (1993 or 1997 depending on the version).