Last March I finished a game called "Spiritfarer." It's about a woman who ferries spirits to the afterlife. You build them homes on your boat, cook their favorite meals, hug them when they're scared, and eventually bring them to a glowing doorway where they disappear forever. I cried harder at the end of Spiritfarer than I've cried at any movie in the last five years.
That experience made me think about something I'd been circling for a while: why do certain games hit me emotionally harder than prestige television? I have a theory. It's about agency. When you choose to say goodbye to a character you've cared for, the grief is different — heavier, more personal — than when you watch a character die in a show. One is something that happened to you. The other is something you watched happen to someone else.
The Agency Gap
Netflix asks you to watch. Games ask you to choose. That distinction changes everything about how stories land.
In "The Last of Us" (the game, not the show), there's a moment where you make a decision that affects millions of fictional people. I sat with my controller for seven minutes before pressing a button. Seven minutes of genuine moral anguish over pixels. The HBO adaptation of the same story was excellent television. But watching Pedro Pascal make that choice hit differently than making it myself. Less weight. Less aftermath. Less lying awake at 2 AM wondering if I did the right thing.
This isn't about games being "better" than shows in some objective sense. It's about the kind of engagement each medium invites. Story-driven games activate something in me that passive consumption doesn't reach. They don't just show me a moral dilemma. They hand it to me and say, "What would you do?"
The Investment Problem
Here's the honest counterargument: games take longer. A forty-hour RPG is a serious time commitment. A two-hour movie is a Tuesday evening. There's real value in shorter, complete narrative experiences.
But I'd push back slightly. The depth of emotional investment in a long game creates a different kind of meaning. Spending sixty hours with a character before losing them produces a grief that a ninety-minute film can't replicate, because you haven't earned it in the same way. You didn't choose to spend sixty hours with a movie character. You just sat there.
I'm not saying everyone should play sixty-hour games. I'm saying that when people dismiss gaming as a "lesser" medium, they're usually thinking of the wrong games. They're imagining shooters and sports sims, not the deeply personal JRPGs that explore identity, loss, and meaning with more nuance than most literary fiction.
Beauty in Interactive Spaces
Some of the most beautiful environments I've ever experienced were digital. The flooded ruins in "Journey." The twilight forests in "Ori and the Blind Forest." The quiet coastal village in "Sea of Solitude." These aren't just backgrounds. They're emotional architecture. You move through them, and they move through you.
There's a concept in game design called "environmental storytelling" — the idea that the space itself tells you something without words. A child's drawing on a wall in an abandoned house. A single flower growing through cracked concrete. A chair positioned to face a sunset. Engaging with beauty in interactive form activates a different kind of attention than watching it pass by on a screen.
The Both/And Approach
I'm not trying to convert anyone away from movies and shows. I love film. I think television is in a golden age. But I also think gaming belongs at the table of serious storytelling, and most cultural commentary still treats it like the weird cousin nobody wants to sit next to.
My recommendation: if you've never played a narrative game, try one. "Gris" takes three hours and tells a story about grief through color and movement without a single word of dialogue. "Florence" takes thirty minutes and captures falling in and out of love more honestly than most romantic films. These aren't niche. They're human. They just use a different canvas.
The best stories don't ask you to just watch. They ask you to participate. And participation, I've found, is where meaning lives.