often see this (very true) observation made, rarely see it elucidated upon.
slinging down some 3am repetitions of my usual talking points -> https://twitter.com/transgamerthink/status/1390332841439993861

starting point 1: the whole event is conversational. a play's actors are not performing in isolation, and respond + channel the audiences energy (in turn a collective manifestation). games and audience share a room, and a connection. games must look directly at the camera.

starting point 2: a movie can conform to our reality, and can be indistinguishable from documentary footage. theatre, within the stage, unedited performance, and blocking lacks that facility

As with games, the closer a play's production comes to presenting itself as <real>, the more farcical it becomes. authenticity must transcend.

starting point 3: following the above two points, the nature of <portrayal> is breached by an inability to replicate. we cannot seriously, convincingly observe a subject in a game. new vectors must be considered and emphasized.

starting point 4: following point 2, having matured enough to acknowledge that the whole thing is <fake>, theater wields the components of that artifice with purpose and intent.

it has grown out of simply looking the other way on these exposed components.

Games tend toward fumbling around cluelessly, seeing elements such as interface and innate gameplay limitation not as having expressive potential, but as mere functional tools...

starting point 5: the lightings gonna be a bit shit

Rant:

Theater coarsens nuances. Why? It has to enlarge things (look at acting style on the stage! the sets! the lighting rigs!).

Games are the same. Think of the enlargement in everything. jump height. room size. third person attack animation. FPS reloads. dialogue patterns.

Eugene Ionesco brought up the coarsened nuances and proposed that the situation here was in fact that things were merely insufficiently enlarged. Enlargement is the essence of theater. Embrace it.

Of course, any technique is subjective. But a failure to embrace the essence of any thing leaves it trapped within an intermediary zone...

Games are perfectly capable of observing lessons long learnt *across the board* in theater, regardless of school of thought & practice... and find that they will, normally, be quite cleanly applicable in the medium.