I'm not going to bother even arguing with Roger Ebert because he's so wrong about games that I would be just wasting my time explaining why. Also, he probably wouldn't pay attention to me. It would be more worthwhile arguing with someone who claims that gravity doesn't exist.
Games are the most exciting art form right now. Film, music, and even elevision are very well established. As forms of art, they are pretty well understood. Games aren't at all. Their mystery is what makes them so exciting!
The Meaningful Play conference was one of the best experiences of my life. I was surrounded by tons of creative and talented people who all looked at games like I do. Leaving the conference I was overflowing with excitement for the future of games. There is still so much that we don't know about games, and this is why I was so excited.
Talk after talk, and conversation after conversation, there were so many different ideas as to what games can be and just how to achieve that. There are many different theories about what makes games compelling. Seeing so many different approaches, even ones that don't quite work, was thrilling.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, maybe), a lot of it depends so heavily on technology. This has always been gaming's biggest limitation. Not too long after the development of cinema, the technology for its production had more or less been established. The technology would continue to develop, but mostly for the purpose of making production easier and more cost effective, or making visual effects more convincing. In the end, though, the impact was more or less the same.
Games haven't had this luxury. The technology limited everything about what could be expressed in a game. These limitations forced game designers to be as creative as possible, trying to create as many different types of experiences out of the meager means. But it would only go so far.
More important than brute power and technological progress are the tools used to develop games. This is very important, actually. The possibility for beautiful graphics is already here, much of which is only possible with huge teams of designers and software engineers. As time goes on, the ability for small teams to create simliar experiences is expanding. Like the digital video revolution currently happening, gaming is undergoing a similar revolution. A team of two or three people can create a visually beautiful experience that rivals what big studios can produce because of development tools that make production easier and more intuitive. This is even more important that just simple technological power. It makes projects less of a risk and designers more likely to innovate and push some envelopes. Big, scary envelopes. It shifts the development away from software engineers and more into the hands of artists.
Technology isn't the only reason to be so excited. As time goes on, games are drawing a much more diverse type of talent. Games have always had a difficult time being taken seriously. They are always portrayed as juvenile. Even in some recent movies, if you want a character to seem emotionally stunted or childish, show them playing videogames. I have always found this notion pretty offensive, but I'll save that for another post. At any rate, because of this stigma, gaming hasn't always been drawing the best from the artistic talent pool. That's really starting to change. Newer generations of artists grew up with videogames, and aren't looking at them with the same derision as older generations. At Meaningful Play, this was very obvious, as a lot of the designers called themselves "artists" just like a filmmaker would. This new generation of artists are looking at games as just another medium. I can't tell you how encouraging this simple fact was. I wasn't talking to "just" game designers, I was talking to artists who are making games.
All of this relates to the tremendous transition games are undergoing. There is still so much that we have to learn about the way games work and affect people. At Meaningful Play, there were researchers and designers who were working toward a greater understanding of this. Robin Hunicke's talk about ThatGameCompany's upcoming game was a great example. It was about how the concept of their game shifted based on play testing. The players weren't playing the game in the way they were expecting, and that type of feedback really influenced the game. This process of mystery and discovery is why this age of gaming is so exhilarating.
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