Allowing people to make their own choices/lose/move at their own pace is a flaw of the medium for a conversation like this. Do people playing/loving games think of it like that? No of course not. But if you’re having this dumb discussion then it needs to be considered
I think it's more realistic than it is shallow. There's a massive culture problem in gaming and a huge barrier of entry too.
I will always choose to play a game and get lost in a world like Elden Ring or Tears Of The Kingdom than watch a show or listen to an album. I just get far more out of it, IMO.
I bust out the Switch for Smash Bros pretty often, typically if I’m sitting around listening to records or if my wife is watching something on TV that I don’t really care about but I still just want to hang out in the room with her. Maybe once every couple of years I’ll get big into an RPG like Hollow Knight or Metroid. But that’s about it on gaming for me
All the mediums do something the others can’t so I don’t think it makes sense to compare them when you can just enjoy something about all of them
I think it's silly to say that there will "never" be a singular game. With a medium that's basically still in its infancy and the fact that technology is evolving as fast as it is there could easily be one game in the future.
However, I do think that there's a great possibility that the world will end before we ever get to see the day where a game like that could be fully realized with the way things are heading these days
sure but I just don’t see the point in comparing them when ultimately they are all so different in how they present themselves. And this is just for me personally.
if you're comparing art cross mediums, video games are at a disadvantage in relation to other masterpieces of their mediums. as beautiful, moving, and incredible experiences my favorite video games are, the constraints of the medium are consistently the most visible and the storytelling is rarely uniquely innovative, especially when compared to the incredibly rich and diverse histories of storytelling in literature and even cinema. music I have a hard time even comparing to mediums like books, movies, and TV. Poetry is closer to comparable to me and also good (I have deja vu, sorry if this conversation has happened before and I said all this before)
I do think video games present their own unique ability to tell a story, especially in the world of indie gaming. That Dragon, Cancer comes to mind.