This is a short response to Michael Abbott’s latest post over at the Brainy Gamer, on the topic of understanding video games as artistic works. While I couldn’t possibly put his eloquent words into finer poesy, perhaps the following few points are worth thinking about. I admit that they’re controversial points, but I don’t offer them for the sake of controversy - I simply want to extend the “language” for video games in whatever way I can. The best way to do this, I think, is to make some distinctions between the kinds of language often used in video and computer games, which are often mixed up and conflated with each other. This is my first official crack at it.
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Michael’s article, “Good game / bad game” over at the Brainy Gamer, provoked me to come up with some sort of response as both a psychologist-to-be and a gamer terribly critical of the existing debates surrounding games-and-culture. Michael’s article takes on the existing (rather heated and polemical) debates about games and their relation to academic research, and his hope that academic research may paint a path out of a moral minefield full of hot air and rhetoric. Without cutting to the chase too soon, I hope to demonstrate that in fact academic research has (so far) done very little to bring any kind of intellectual finesse or insights to the debates on video games, gives us no reason to look to them for help, and is just as susceptible to unintelligible monkey screaming matches.
After reading psychochild’s critique of the industry’s failure to learn from WoW’s financial success, I keep asking myself: does this re-analysis tell us anything about how to advance the mainstream game industry?
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