Except Kubrick isn't as experimental as he likes to think he is and 2001 is not equivalent to James Joyce, let alone Ulysses. There are much more experimental films that can be likened to Ulysses.
There are more experimental, less accessible films than Kubrick, but such films aren't held up as the
high art of the form nearly as often as their analogies in literature. The Western Canon is full of works that would be considered impenetrable to the average reader, today, or just straight up dry and tedious, even when they can understand it. Part of this is due to a general decrease in literacy standards in the West. But part of it is also due to the medium itself: critically recognized films are just more accessible, period, and that probably has much to do with the differences in production requirements - ie the fact that films are typically more expensive to make and therefore must target a larger audience, while writers, especially in the old days, could live on the praise of a small circle of literary academics and supporters. Or, as Eliot put it in his own review of the famous impenetrability of
Ulysses, "the next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs."
Yet, a hundred years from now, when people look back at our time, and try to work out the most influential works of culture that shaped our society, I am confident that they will primarily pick examples from film and video games, rather than literature. Perhaps they will even find it as inaccessible in their time, as the average reader today does the works of Joyce. But this is the way change happens. High literature, in the old fashion, is a dying form. It has no where near its influence a hundred years ago, not only because the average person is no longer reading, but also because the literary pundits on which they depended for social impact are, themselves, more irrelevant than ever. Films and video games are the formative trends of our generation, and they would be wise to not try and imitate the past, as though to share their fate.
The problem is not whether games should be equivalent to T. S. Eliot or anyone else, it's about how to actually write with text (which PoE1 and 2 have in spades) to not come off as someone who just read the definition of poetry. Sack of flesh and merry gourd all right. The overall form and content of writing is universal across mediums, those being logical characters that affect the plot, the plot going somewhere, it being a whole connected thing, not just a string of events that hardly pertain to one another, having an interesting story, etc. Technical mishaps in the sentence structure or too much flowery prose can be forgiven if those things are in place, yet most of the time they are not. I gave Eliot as an example of how you can say a lot with few words, not whether video games should be like Eliot or not. PoE says nothing with its entire cornucopia of words, words, words and more words and that's the problem.
Yes, but you could've given a better example to avoid this debate. The trouble with Pillars of Eternity isn't that its writing fails to reach the heights of T. S. Eliot, it's that it doesn't have much to say. We don't actually want Eliot or Milton or Joyce in our games. We just want coherent story lines and ideas. It's not just you, either. I've often seen people cite high literature as examples of proper writing, without understanding that, especially in the context of the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the best known literary authors became famous not because they followed the rules of coherence but because they broke the rules of coherence. They were impenetrable and inaccessible to a fault, and they saw it as a mark of
genius. This is not what you want to aspire to when criticizing video game writing, because it's very possible that you communicate the wrong idea to developers, that we actually want more dense writing.
