Gaming as a Legitimate Medium

A lot of people have expressed the notion that games need to move on to that next plateau of critical acceptance to become a more legitimate medium in the eyes of the masses. Games as "art" is a common argument that is pushed as how this is supposed to be accomplished. Games that are supposed to be meaningful on several levels, games that are supposed to make you think, games that are supposed to make you feel, these are popular examples of how the entirety of the genre is supposed to clear that hurdle. But with games in all the aforementioned categories existing, what is it that needs to be done to help with popular critical acceptance?

One of the problems with this subject is that with different mediums comes different methods of drawing in the audience to experiencing what is being told or shown to them. With movies there's a lot of subtlety and nuance in what is being shown, what is being expressed in the scene or the whole. There is a compassion from the audience that is being drawn out, a feeling of familiarity with the problems being shown and, in most cases, overcome. Even when the problems are unfamiliar, and even when those problems cannot be overcome, the audience in most cases can relate to the feeling of insurmountable objectives ahead of them and form a sympathy to the characters, helping them to develop attachments to the story and overall arc of the film. With art proper there is what the artist means, as well as what the viewer takes out of it, regardless of if that was the artist's original intention or not. Even when designed for a single purpose, to evoke a single emotion, that emotion may or may not be what the artist had in mind when viewed from a different perspective by a different person. With books or short stories the author may present a version that they believe, or want those who read it to believe, and those that read that story will take from it what they know from experience and what they perceive as the meaning. So even with the architect of all those trying to express and evoke what they want the subject audience to take out of those experiences, it all rests in the hands of those being subjected to take what they will and process it to something they can understand.

So gaming should have an upper hand in this argument, right? Video games take something from all the aforementioned mediums and combine it into something tangible that those that play them can actually control and have a say in the process of the journey through the story. They now have the cinematic control of showing the audience what the creator wants them to see, they have control over the art style to try and evoke feelings throughout, and they have the ability to tell a story that can rival even the greatest stories from literature. However even with all of these advantages something is missing from video games that all those other groups have; something is holding them back from being truly meaningful.

That's not saying that some games aren't well and truly great, and mean something deeper than most of the mindless hack, slash, and shoot drivel that exists, but there are some things that just can't truly be expressed by this digital form of story telling. Problems such as addiction, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, or any type of personal problem just can't be handled by a player driven device. True, there are games that attempt to tackle things such as these in them, but the difference between having temporary stat penalties and the unyielding thirst of an alcoholic are worlds apart. Having your screen disorient in a game is not equal to coming off of weeks of drug abuse and having to reorient yourself to normal life. There is no audio cue that can express depression of a character well enough. There is nothing that can make a person experience how jarring it is when someone with something wrong with their mental state gets forced not to do what they feel they need to.

However, who wants to play a game about a main character who has a drug and depression problem, who's goal is to survive themselves? Where would fun be derived out of something like that? As many people are clamoring over themselves to cry out that games need more, deeper meanings, have any thought to themselves about what that would entail for actual gameplay, length, and story? Gaming is a large story telling device, but when it goes from the story to actual control of the character, all the emotion disappears. Sadness can not be expressed running around a static game world, anger can not be felt selecting attack from a menu, and deeper meaning can not be expressed by simply "playing" a game.

Can gaming become the next emotional medium, rivaling movies and art as a moving and legitimate platform? Yes, they can. It's going to take a lot of rethinking on the developer side and audience side of things to make this happen though. Developers will have to rethink what a game is and what they can do with it, and the audience is going to have to rethink what they expect from a game, as a deeply moving story should not have to be made with a jump button, or with the main character having a gun for an arm. Doing that, however, runs the risk of making a game "boring" and alienating potential users, but if that bridge is gapped somehow, balancing an experience worth playing with a story worth following through with gameplay that makes sense to the story without making a fourth wall that is too great, games could potentially be the best damn medium for story telling that we as a culture have.