Word Play
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This has traditionally found its home in either role-playing games, adventures or games hybridised with those genres. Consider the most extreme and artistically satisfying example of what words can allow in recent times, Black Isle's Planescape Torment, which crammed 800,000 words into a relatively short for the genre, but impressively dense, RPG. (We just thought that there was so much you could do with written description facial expressions, motions of the hand, etc, that we didn't have the art resources to represent,) remembers Chris Avellone, lead designer on Planescape: Torment, and now at Obsidian, (To do all the cinematics, animations, and movies to capture the memory sequences, companion expressions, and other moments just would have been impossible.) It also went against the occasional stated wisdom that text is just too much work. (I don't think text is any harder to produce than building tilesets, models or doing anmations,) Chris, whose fellow designer Colin McComb credits as having written literally half of Planescape, adds (if you love doing it, it's no work at all.)
Torment's also interesting in that most of the most important moments in the game only vividly appear in the text. To choose a memorable example, it's a game whose (best) endings close with a conversation rather than the traditional open brawl with the end of game baddy. That these conversation trees prove so memorable is a testament to its power. (I think written descriptions of moments allows the player's imagination to paint how the scene plays out (and fill in the gaps), and it ends up being stronger for it,) considers Chris, (The more you let the player bring to the experience, the better.)
