You misunderstand me. I still enjoy games, sometimes a lot. But story is what can make the game truly great to me. And you are right, that I will not find that in games, and that's why I spend less time gaming and more time reading nowadays. .To be honest, your entire approach to gaming suspends my disbelief. Because we're talking about gaming, not high art. And even high art has problems "truly moving people emotionally" and "teaching something new about life".
Pong? Pacman? Space Invaders? Nope, no "world being truly believable" there.
Mario Brothers? Tetrus? Civilisation? Nope again.
Wizardry? Might and Magic? Ultima? Nope, one is clearly still in a completely fabricated world that the player is fully aware of, mostly grinding game-like content.
Narrative gaming? Sure, RPGs have scope for that, but it's always still going to be a background element, the foreground being gameplay.
The only way to get what you're pining for in gaming is to play either adventure games or visual novels, and the former are still games, which will require gamey elements which will reduce your ability to suspend your disbelief, for example:
The Longest Journey has a wonderful atmosphere and story and character narratives, however, it's a computer adventure game, so you have to come to a narrative standstill until you impossibly realise you have to combine 10 entirely unrelated random inventory items in a specific order and apply them to one random needle in a haystack in-game object in order for the game (narrative) to progress.
You strike me as someone who's browsing in a shoe shop and then complaining to the assistant about the lack of hats available to buy, because if they're selling apparel, why aren't they selling hats!
I'm not expecting gaming to be something it is not, but just don't enjoy it as much as I used to. I wish the stories and character building in games could be as great as they are in books, but they are not. At least not yet.
Edit: What I wrote above is about story driven RPGs. I didn't like the Icewind Dale games or blobbers much, due to not having enough focus on story. Other genres can have other criteria, I guess, though I never thought about them as much.
And BTW, I think a better comparison than yours would be to enter IKEA and hope there is unique furniture to be found there, or enter a comic book store and hope there are comics with the literary quality of great books there. Both are unrealistic, but hey, one can always dream.
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