I humbly think it is by far too early to say that. I know the anxiety you mean; but that is then also a problem of a game showing you Interesting Things while having a big countdown in the background. In ballet there can be a huge number of simultaneous things happening without viewer anxiety over missing parts (which will inevitably happen). I think the anxiety more comes from badly guiding players and bad scene set-ups than the possibility of looking around. Certainly when you get to something like Koyaanisqatsi, which has far less of a clear "Interesting Things".
What I mean is there is a clear focus, and there is periphery, and if there is a scene and it isn't clear what is its focus that's generally considered poor staging. I can't recall ever having seen such a scene myself. Sometimes there are slow tableau like scenes where there is time to look at all of the different elements one by one like a painting, but the elements themselves will then be overall static. So I don't have a problem with having the option to look around. I just doubt that it will be used unless the viewer/player already knows the scene by heart and it can't hold their attention, or they have something like ADD or autism or can't resist the urge to fidget with the shifting apparatus, in which case that could be a net negative even as an option.
This is why a lot of the time people think holodeck like technology will be a new way to experience movies, but it won't be. It will only work in an intimate setting like a classroom or basically something that can play out in a single room, and it would have to be short and self contained since moving to different scenes would be disorienting, and if there is a narrative again you have the anxiety of not knowing where to focus, so it has to be a much more open scenario where where you focus is more fluid and so it cannot be a substitute for cinema, like 3D glasses or anything like that.
we do need a Koyaanisqatsi of games, too.
Funny that you should say that. I just watched the 'qatsi trilogy in preparation of a new project…
Go oooon....
In the U.S. you never see the first two parts, only the third, which I think I read somewhere is the more underwhelming of the trio. I'm familiar with it because I regularly listen to Phillip Glass for recreation. You can see the third part on Netflix right now, and the third part was always available for rental when I was a kid, but never the others, so I've never encountered them. Speaking of Netflix I was horrified the other night when I noticed that the to-watch list I'd curated for myself had been reduced to at least a forth. I'm less convinced now that Netflix can ever be a semi-permanent home for older films. It's either been gutted or it's going to rotate it's library like a broadcast television channel when technically it shouldn't have to. I expect it's gutted because there's almost no reason to build a watch list unless you can count on the films to remain available. It's a lot of work for nothing otherwise (on the plus side that night I saw Pasolini's Canterbury Tales for the first time. It's now probably my favorite example of a medieval setting, which is a popular one in video games.)
This week ted.com is featuring random old talks. I caught this (
http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics) one which although it's fast I feel like there might be a micrososm for video games in there. I want to start a thread featuring the presentation but I'm a little bit pressed for time. Comics are often compared to games both for being a format that seems overwhelmingly in arrested development but has genuinely progressive things to offer to art, and because supposedly as a medium it hasn't yet experienced a burn out stage where everyone gets tired of arguing about it and so stop and then never recover, that supposedly all other mediums have experienced at some point in their western history as a kind of coming of age. I think all of the ideas on rapid display in the talk are intriguing but also the navigation ones seem almost sibling like to video games.
