Reading And Gaming

With films, television, and music, the experience is a passive one.  The viewer or listener does not have to do anything but watch or listen.  Their minds could of course be actively dissecting the artistic components of the work and any philosophical concepts tied to it, as well as any logical facts about the subject matter or the medium itself, but apart from something along these lines, there is nothing about using such media that in itself requires any sort of active engagement.  This is not some grand deficiency of cinematic media or music (music by itself or accompanying images or text, including in a film or television show).

But reading is different.  To genuinely read, one must actually see what a text says and proceed to see what comes next by paying enough attention to discern the words and what their exact arrangement says.  Now, this layer of mental action involved in reading does not mean people who read are intelligent as some pretend, perhaps to make themselves feel significant or to sell more literature; that is determined strictly by whether they voluntarily embrace the truths of rationalism, starting with self-evident logical axioms.  Exposure to texts one and all, the ability to read, the desire to read, and the habit of doing so are entirely unrelated to whether someone is intelligent.  They can still grasp the necessary truth of pure logic either way, and without looking to mere words for prompting.  Preference for literature over a more cinematic medium is just that: mere subjective preference.

All the same, there really is an element of mental effort required in the experience of reading that is not by default part of watching a movie or television show or listening to music.  It does not matter how abstract or excellent a work of the latter forms of media is.  Someone does not have to do anything to continue using it besides just watching or listening.  Although books tend to get a disproportionate amount of celebration over the fact that the reader must put in some amount of active effort, one medium clearly goes far beyond even literature in its foundational requirement for action on the user's part—that of video games.

In fact, a video game already encompasses or could encompass, depending on the degree of technological advancement, literally every basic aspect of a book or any other medium.  Video games can have onscreen text in the form of subtitles, documents, or lore descriptions embedded into works of a much greater artistic scope than the format of a book ever could allow for, even with illustrations or physically interactive aspects like noise-making features or varied textures.  But video games can also have audio that includes music and spoken dialogue, and they can contain cinematics passively viewed rather than actively played as would constitute the majority of the content in most titles.

This is the only artistic medium that can combine all aspects of the other mediums in at least some form.  Visuals and audio can be integrated for conceptual exploration, immersion, and storytelling, all while the player must in many cases almost constantly do something on both a physical and mental level to progress, far beyond reading words.  The player is responsible for handling button inputs, environmental navigation, puzzles, dialogue choices, and so on.  There can be many more layers to a game than other mediums allow for on their own, all of which need to be actively selected or managed by the player.

The video game format amounts to the most interactive entertainment medium by far and is the one that requires the most attention from a person, while any sort of abstract concepts addressed can be explored much more thoroughly on the artistic level due to the combination of various sensory aspects.  Reading and gaming have the need for active engagement from the user in common, beyond both of them being things that are inevitably governed by logical truths and both of them being artistic media.  But gaming goes much further with this, with some games leaning into it even more than others.