Games as a Medium

One of my favorite games is Earthbound. It's an old 16 bit RPG that was released on the super nintendo. It's full of bright colors, interesting characters, locations, items, and music. It's always hard to describe why someone likes what they do besides waving at the obvious good design choices and reiterating that it is indeed a fully fledged game. You push buttons and things change on the screen, and it feels nice. But this game in particular does those simple elements so well. It's an RPG and like most RPGs it follows a single story that the player travel through as they get farther and farther in the game. In Earthbound you collect verses of a lullaby that's used to soothe and defeat a big alien boss at the end. It deals with mature themes while still remaining fun and light hearted throughout. Even though the main boss is a horrible fleshy alien, a large majority of the game is spent in locations reminiscent to the real world. You explore coastal tourist towns, suburbs, desert oasis's, and remote winter towns alongside your friends. It all feels very genuine and nice. And that is what I mostly look for in a game. I use it as a medium to relax and unwind after a day of productivity. A simple game with nice music and themes of friendship is what I want.
This game in particular can be viewed as a literature very easily. Even if we look at literature in it's most basic definition, Earthbound tells a lot of its story through text. There's written text boxes all over, the game encourages the player to talk to every NPC they can and read every sign post. All of which contain pertinent information to the games world and lore. Even more on the nose are the few "coffee breaks" the player takes within the game. In these segments the player literally takes a break with one of the NPCs and it cuts to a giant star wars like scrolling block of text in which the player is recapped on the events of the story. Earthbound also uses visual and musical cues on top of this to further enhance its story.