I personally think they are. But that’s coming from someone who reads books more than i have time to play video games.

At best, stories in video games are very short stories. If you just write down the story, it’s not going to take you even an hour to read the whole thing. This doesn’t leave you any time to tell a really good story. Games rely on the player to make up the difference in the storytelling through their actions.

Some games do better than others, but they’re never going to tell a story as well as an actual novel would be able to tell that same story.