There are video games that exist purely as mechanics, as systems. They inherit many of their characteristics from board games, card games, puzzles, and sports. I have been known to enjoy many of these kinds of games, and to play them often and regularly. Tetris is one example. Rock Band is another. Sometimes, these kinds of games have stories associated with them, but they are only peripheral; you can easily remove the story, or replace it with another, and the overall feel of the game mechanics will always remain the same. The quality and artistic merit of the game therefore depends on the elegance and functionality of the mechanics. They are beautiful in the same sense that architecture and mathematical formulae are beautiful. And although this is a kind of beauty I admire and respect, it is not the kind of beauty that I primarily aspire to in my own work.

There are also video games that exist as interactive stories. They inherit many of their characteristics from literature, film, theatre, and informal roleplaying, and their mechanics exist to serve the telling of the story rather than to stand on their own. The mechanics are therefore not judged on their own, but as a part of a greater whole, along with several other elements: plot, setting, characterisation, dialogue, visual presentation, sound, music. The quality of these elements on their own, while important, are secondary to the manner in which they fit together to deliver a unified theme. It is these kinds of games that I often criticize as underdeveloped when it comes to being works of high art, though unlike the Roger Eberts of the world, I see great potential in them to be so. It is these kinds of games that I aspire to create myself.

I’m home sick with a bad cold this weekend, so I’ve been spending the better part of my day relaxing at my desk and playing a few selected games from the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Though I have played IF games before, this actually happens to be my first time ever voting in this comp, so I’m not always sure what I should be expecting in a good entry. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to judge the games somewhat reasonably, nevertheless.

See, the thing is, while I started playing computer games reasonably early for someone my age, I wasn’t really around for Infocom and other commercial text adventures. Hell, I wasn’t really around for the early Sierra games that still used text parsers, either. I fell into the genre rather late, once the “verb coin” interfaces from Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island became the defacto standard. As such, the text parser interface in adventure games has been something I’ve never had any particular nostalgia for, resulting in me dismissing it as obsolete and unnecessarily difficult to learn. [1]

But wait! There’s more…

Regarding the whole “games as art” movement, I’ve noticed that what several of its proponents want is for games as they exist today to be considered as “art” by the mainstream. What this really means is that they want cultural acceptance; they want people to stop seeing their beloved hobby as a waste of time, intended only for children. Because they like games that deal with adult things. Like violence. And naked ladies. And using the eff word in every single sentence. And anyone who doesn’t like that sort of thing is the next Jack Thompson.

The thing is, a few exceptions aside, most games are a pointless waste of time. Particularly the most heavily-marketed ones. I say, if games want cultural acceptance, they have to earn it first. If games want to be seen as “for adults” rather than just “for kids”, then they need to be about things adults actually find interesting and emotionally significant, not about things that make teenagers giggle. If we want to prove that games are a storytelling medium on par with all the others, we’ve got to write more than just space operas. If we want people other than adolescent boys to play games, we’ve got to stop making games that are only for adolescent boys. It really is that simple.

If you want people to stop smirking at your favourite pastime, then show them a good example of a game you’ve played that demonstrates true maturity in its subject matter. It works for me all the time; I’ll describe Third World Farmer or Photopia or Psychonauts, and most of the time, I’ll get a “hey, that’s interesting”. Let the games speak for themselves. And if somehow people aren’t convinced that these games you love have anything deep or meaningful to say about the world, because, you know, they’ve actually read books and stuff, accept that they don’t measure up to their standards. Don’t lament and demand that everyone laud them as the pinnacle of artistic expression, and call people names if they don’t. That’s childish.

I’ve been really liking the Blogs of the Round Table topics these past few months, so here’s yet another one I’m going to respond to. This month, Corvus is asking us to share our early experiences of playing games with our families — or alternatively, of not playing games with our families — and how they affected our approaches to gaming today.

The very first thing I should mention on this subject is that I love my family. I was raised to believe that I could do anything I wanted to, and having a doctor for a mother [1] and an engineer-turned-college teacher-turned-university administrator for a father, both of whom were immigrants to Canada, certainly helped me internalise that belief. My career-so-far in the video game industry has been met with nothing but support and encouragement, starting from that time when I was about ten years old and asked my father how video games were made, who replied by giving me a book that taught me how to program in BASIC.

That said, I never really played video games with my family.

But wait! There’s more…