Games need much more than photorealistic graphics (Score 2, Insightful)

In fact, they don't need graphics at all!

Here I talk about 1st-person "story-oriented" games, not 3rd-person strategy games. How about games taking on more interesting stories? How about NPCs that can actually learn from one-another and generate some semblance of human language on the fly, characters who are not just dumb entities that you click on so they tell you everything they know as some predetermined monologue in some predetermined tone, despite your shooting your gun 5 feet from them. How about games which can generate their own subplots, so the game designers themselves can play their games?

Most games have certainly been quite bland in these arenas, and I don't think it will improve until the games industry starts hiring NLP (and other) specialists to design moderately intelligent systems which allow for more interesting character interaction. Right now the assumption is that putting games online makes them more "interactable," but that mostly makes games open to excessive PKing, cheating, and a distinct lack of role-playing. I'm sure there are some arenas where this isn't so true (personally I've played some on great NWN servers, where the story/role-playing take precedence over the obnoxious "I wanna level every night so I can show my friends I'm better" mentality of so many online gamers.

Anyhoo, perhaps one day NPC character interaction will improve and NPCs will rise up from their servitude and take over! And then we'll be sorry we mercilessly slaughtered them for their key to the crypts (when their relatives come and hunt us down).

Consequences for character actions which the game designers themselves do not even know -- that's a fascinating game feature.