RTR said:
Detaching the entire medium from its roots could make videogames lose their appeal to many people, myself included. I believe it's an important element of a person's maturity to accept certain things, particularly things that might seem childish or immature for an adult to even consider, for what they are as opposed to outright rejecting them in a manner befitting a "brooding" teenager.
On this, we're in full agreement. In case I wasn't being clear before, I don't object to the concept that video games are toys because of some idea that toys are innately childish. I object merely because they're different, in the same way I'd object to the claim that video games are a type of movie.
RTR said:
The idea of having videogames doing that as a rule, to think of its own medium as art first and entertainment second, is absurd to me and could probably make me abandon videogames altogether. Now obviously, the best case scenario is a game that can do both well.
But art, being designed to provoke an emotional response, is inherently entertaining. If a video game puts a great amount of effort into being a work of art and succeeds, its entertainment value will automatically follow. So it's foolish for a work in an artistic medium not to make the attempt to be artistic.
"Entertainment," by the way, does not mean that having fun is essential to the experience. Books and films are entertainment as much as video games are, but you don't read
1984 if you're looking for a pleasant time. Nor does artistic merit somehow preclude children from being participants: One need look no further than Pixar to see that (or for that matter, Disney in general). And because art aims to evoke emotion, something that succeeds in being very fun is thus a very successful work of art. There wasn't that much to the original
Super Mario Bros. apart from being fun, but that was a landmark artistic work, and tremendously important to the medium as a whole. I would consider
Painkiller to be a far superior piece of art to
Haze, in spite of the former offering nothing but simple, straightforward fun while the latter was a deconstruction of militaristic shooters, blind patriotism/allegiance, the glory of armed conflict, etc.
Painkiller succeeded wildly in what it was trying to do, but
Haze's lofty aspirations are worthless because it failed to meet them - just as a game that tried and failed to be enjoyable would be a failure. I don't want the games that are fun and nothing else to go away, because then I'd miss out on some fantastic games. But if we're so concerned with fun that we choose to write off games that aren't meant to be fun regardless of what else they might have to offer, we'll miss out on some equally fantastic games.
RTR said:
Now, take for example Bioshock Infinite. On the one hand, it's a profound story of a man haunted by the sins of his past as they lead him down the road to self destruction. On the other hand, I can zip around the city on a rail as I dangle on it with a magnetic hook, I can drink potions that give me superpowers, and I can shoot down a minigun-weilding robot George Washington. This is the kind of exhilaration in games that I don't think can be achieved if one doesn't approach the development of a game while thinking "Will the player enjoy this?"
Certainly it can. Instead of thinking, "Will the player enjoy this?", it could (and should) instead be thinking, "Will the player be engaged by this?" Enjoyment is merely one out of many different types of engagement, and video games aren't doing themselves any favors by limiting themselves to a single form of engagement. Again, that's not to say that
BioShock Infinite is a weaker or less valid game for being so much fun - far from it - or that it "should" be engaging in a different way. But the same thing would hold true if it hypothetically did choose to engage in a different way, and any cries that it "should" instead be fun would be just as invalid.
RTR said:
I play videogames because they let me feel like I can do things I know I can't experience in the real world. Playing a good game to me is one that evokes a sense of wonder and escapism from the mundane into the exciting, which is honestly not all that different if I were to amuse myself any other way in between responsibilities and other priorites.
Unless you're the kind of person for whom videogames are a way of life (i.e. videogames are your job) then yes, a videogame is not a toy. That doesn't mean one can ignore the fact that for a far larger amount of people, they serve to amuse them, preferably in between responsibilities and the priorities of their daily lives, much like a toy would do.
Quite right. But games don't need to cripple themselves out of the gate in order to fill that role. Just as it's perfectly valid to criticize a game that concerns itself with being like a film before fulfilling its function as a game, a game shouldn't try to make itself like a toy before it tries to make itself a game. There's nothing wrong with films or toys, just as there's nothing wrong with ranch dressing, but just because that's true doesn't mean it's advisable to put ranch dressing on an ice cream sundae.
