Novels and films are comparatively passive media. It's hard to gamify a stream of consciousness, the dance of a camera around a scene, or a conversation in quite the same way; conversation trees get tedious, cutscenes drag on too long and the game risks turning into an interactive movie, or end up with a walking simulator etc.

There's a place for those things but there's a different balance of pacing and tension. Most games more closely resemble thrillers because there's more intense experiences packed in.