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I found this article today entitled “5 Reasons It’s Still Not Cool to Admit You’re a Gamer”.  The author identifies five things that are negative, or just plain sad, about being an avid video gamer and why we are ashamed of them.  I honestly think these thoughts are on to something.  Almost everything that I have to defend my love of video games from is apart of this list.  But I think the article should have been named, “5 Reasons Video Games aren’t Reaching their full Potential”.  Video Games, in my eyes, are becoming a form of art.  They are creative ways for involving people in narrative story.  There is no formula for a good video game, it is actually EXTREMELY hard to create a solid game that people really enjoy and even harder to create one that the majority of people enjoy.  Creating a good game involves placing interactive ways to sense things of a narrative.  It is a form of storytelling while adding a new dimension to it.

Whats that?  Video games as art is complete rubbish?  The same was said about Literature.  About Cinema.  About Music.  And just like those three, Video Games need some time to smooth out the bumps.  We have too much crap in the genre to be taken seriously yet.  Movies like The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, or The Shawshank Redemption are all viewed as some of the best movies of all time.  Aren’t they art?  Or at least major parts of them?  Movies like UHF, The Stupids, or Napoleon Dynamite are three of my favorite guilty pleasure movies of all time.  They are definitely not art.  I think that is where Video Games currently are; making thousands of Superbads that give everyone a good fun time, but doesn’t really move you or stir up any emotions.  Video Games need to focus on making their Casablanca, or whatever.  And there definitely have been some beautiful games that are high up there.  Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is my personal favorite game and is arguably the best video game of all time.  Maybe there has been some beautiful games made, but for every single amazing game, there are 100′s of ‘Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen: Listen to Drive’ kind of games out there…

So what is holding them back?  Well let me break this article down for you with my thoughts on each one along with a quick quote from the article that I think has its merits.  I would still encourage you to read the article first, only 2 pages long, since it will give you a better insight about the author’s, and my, thoughts.

• We Can’t Shake the ‘Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin’ Stereotype
  • For some reason this still gets pinned on us.  Nerdy, pasty, white males who have social problems or whatever you want to assume we are.  Why did we retain this stereotype?  It used to be for all computer users.  The geeks of highschool were the ones that typed up their essays with custom margins, put pictures in their slide shows to make it look professional, had a blog on this super nerdy thing called the internet and actually wrote out their thoughts online for other super nerdy loners to read.  Well guess what?  Now it is super cool to be the computer nerd.  Blog, personal website, facebook profiles, tweeting, they are all looked upon as the norm.  In fact, if you don’t use the internet then you are the weird one.  So how did gamers keep this and everyone else didn’t?  Easy.  Computers/The Internet moved away from this stereotype, games haven’t(as much).  Which is explained in the next point.
  • “Everybody plays video games now, right? My mom plays them. Yet, there is still a “if you have touched a video game controller, you have never touched a boob” stigma attached. It’s so universally believed that somebody put up a whole lot of capital to start a business cashing in on it(gamecrush.com)–where you can pay women to play video games with you, or just look at their boobs).  And damn, do us gamers ever play the part. Get us on chat or an Xbox Live headset with a female and suddenly we’re drunk on puberty juices.“
• The Industry Thinks We’re All 17-Year-Old Douchebags Like
  • I said, we grew out of it but games did not.  I think really the only needed thing to point out is all the ramped up sexuality in games.  It isn’t even called for.  It is almost like the video game is created as an excuse to model some busty 3D female.  Crude mini-games where you press buttons to watch two people bone?  Cheat codes to make all the women in the game bouncing around naked?  Video gamers were mainly teen males back in the day, so maybe you could argue that the industry was just appealing to their audience.  But we grew up.  We also were joined by females, almost half of active gamers are women.  We are adults now with spouses and jobs and would like to have something called dignity.  We want to deal with something other than angsty teenage hormones in our games.  We want to deal with actual themes plots.  We want to deal with things that matter.
  • “Again, “Mature” is the rating, and I’ve come to learn that “Mature” in video game land means “teenage male.” So here we are again with the stereotype, the games themselves selling the kind of sex fantasy that appeals to specifically to males who have never actually had a relationship with a female.“
• Video Game Storytelling is Still at the Level of B Movies
  • This point is were I wouldn’t agree totally with what the article has to say.  While most games do indeed not care much about a story or plot, many do and make an effort towards it.  I think it is a little unfair to throw Halo, Gears of War, and Mass Effect all into the same storyline of ‘some random dude kills a lot of aliens’.  You an do that with a lot of movies.  Look at this, The Thing, Predator, and Aliens all revolve around killing the alien(s) but all their stories are not only completely different but they are quite good as far as keeping me interested go.  Again, Casino Royale, Gladiator, and Lord of the Rings I, II, and III all are great action movies and have great storylines.  But if you really wanted to, you could just say they are just about killing.  And again, Definitely Maybe, Failure to Launch, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days can all be called generic chick flicks, but each has good story and I like them.  So sure, they can be abstracted down to common threads, but you’re throwing away the stories that make them good to do so.  Right now Video Games are mostly action based because it makes people excited if they can put themselves in the shoes of a warrior.  Other aspects of this art will come when they are implemented solidly.  Like I said before, many people will just make a quick crude game, but the artists are the developers who will push the way people play the game and the stories within them to change these standards.
  • “With very, very few exceptions, video game plots are stuck at this level. It’s storytelling at its most primitive: good guy with a gun, thousands of bad guys, the happy ending comes when you make enough of the bad guys dead. Characters are crude, cartoonish archetypes–grizzled soldier, grizzled gangster, femme fatale, cool hit man, bumbling fat guy, robot.“
• We’re Still Obsessed by Shiny Gadgets
  • I’m playing a game called Alan Wake right now.  It’s great.  It is genius.  It shakes the ‘Lonely, Anti-Social Virgin’ stereotype.  The makers do not think I am a 17-year-old douchebag.  The story is thrilling and I’m still not sure how it will end!  The graphics are so clean.  The game deals alot with light and darkness and I really haven’t seen shadows or rays of light rendered so beautifully anywhere else.  So why is a game like this getting rated down by quite a few people?  Somebody took a screenshot of the game, zoomed in 500 percent and started to count the pixels to make sure every frame was rendering at the maximum 720p resolution the Xbox 360 is capable of.  Some frames weren’t, people got mad, and said it sucks.  There are over 2,000 posts on the topic at the game’s website.  Really?  They cut down on some quality that is BARELY NOTICEABLE and all hell breaks loose?  Don’t get me wrong, I think if you’re cutting quality because you’re being sloppy and just want to finish then you better fix it.  But the game looks freaking beautiful.  The developers know what they are doing when they decide to cut the pixel count down in areas to make the game better.  If a painting is amazing but people find out later that the painter didn’t use the best kind of paint possible is that painting suddenly less?  Well I actually don’t know the answer to that question, so painters you tell me.  But I wouldn’t really care since the painting still looks good.
  • “Who’s that woman Alan is talking to? Where are they going? How does it play into the story? What emotions is this scene going to elicit? Tension? Dread? Humor? HOW CAN YOU WORRY ABOUT SUCH THINGS WHEN THE ROLL CAGE ON HIS PICKUP TRUCK ONLY HAS A 19:25 PIXEL RATIO.“
• We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues
  • One word here guys, piracy.  And you know what, I stand convicted.  I could count on one hand the number of games I have pirated, but that doesn’t really excuse my theft does it?  I’ve been thinking over the whole issue of downloading things for free, music, software, games, and I have to say that I really kind of feel bad about it.  I should stop.  I need to stop.  It is the right thing to do.  I could make up excuses all day long about how I wouldn’t buy that game anyway, so they aren’t really losing any money.  I mean, logically, if I like a game and I want more games like it from the makers of the game, shouldn’t I support that game so the makers can make money to create more great games?  We need to take responsibility for this market of games that we love and want.  We can’t spoil it by only taking and not giving.  Now, this doesn’t mean I’m perfectly okay with how DRM is managed or how DLC is used.  But both of those were kind of in response to pirating in the first place.  Maybe if we don’t break the developer’s trust then we wouldn’t have to be governed by actual game content released as DLC.  Maybe if we just put out some money, our video games COULD render every object in our games in the maximum resolution.  Maybe the game writers could start to experiment a little with game plot lines and branch out into A+ plot lines that emotionally involve us all.  Maybe the developers won’t have to resort to sex-shock as a marketing scheme and start creating games with better content.  Maybe once we begin to release the limits we have put on video games, the others will begin to lift and we won’t look like 17-year-old-horny-douchebags to everyone.
  • “Gosh, I wonder why these publishers are putting all of their resources into the harder-to-pirate consoles instead? Forget about the debate over the morality of file sharing. It’s not that; it’s just simple cause-effect. We’re smashing out the windows because it’s fun, and then crying because the rain is coming in. It makes us all look like spoiled, entitled brats with no concept of how the adult world works. Don’t tell me this is because gamers are mostly kids, either–the average age of video game players is 35.“

Well, there you have it.  Agree.  Disagree.  Critique.