Games Are A Growing Medium

In which I outline a little about games, their purpose, and where we're going.

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I was reading a piece on video games and their cultural effect, and its opening includes the following:

In the pages of a book, you meet people who, incredibly, do not think, act, or live like you, and who, in contrast to those around you in real life, are not there to meet your every need. A video game’s effect is quite the opposite: it offers a world built entirely around the whims of its player. Suddenly and irresistibly, you are able to choose what kind of car you’d like to drive, how to spend your money, what clothes to wear, and whose head you’d like to stomp upon. In video games, children are allowed an element of practical agency that is otherwise unknown within the usual sensible and stifling parameters of childhood.

The novel, and certainly the letter and the poem, are all diverse in their modern form, as we’ve allowed voices to rise and diversity to bloom in modern times, but the written word, too, used to simply be a way to either document the world or to recount a story to either the young, or to those who were mature (and, notably, not laboring all day) and had leisure time.

Classical visual art, the art sponsored by patrons in the West anyway, was used chiefly to preserve, or exaggerate, reality (royal portraits and the like) or to express religious beauty. It, too, didn’t receive the ability to reveal a world of creativity or truth until relatively recently in history, at least that wasn’t its mainstream purpose.

Music, too, used to follow rigid Western structure and has only within the last couple centuries been used, in the mainstream, for personal exploration, to expose another person’s perspective or creativity.

Video games are a young medium, and with beautiful, insightful games that challenge the player, or the narrator, or the narrative form itself, we can see the medium today is breaking out of these young, self-centered roots. And, let’s not pretend all art isn’t, both in past and present, sometimes self centered, let’s not fall into the trap of pretending video games don’t deserve the label “art” because of something so patently untrue.