Taking games seriously
polycounter lvl 8
pre-warning: I suspect that there have been threads in the past that have had a discussion on this very subject. I have honestly looked around for them, but found nothing solid. So if you think this thread is unneccessary or the discussion has been opened too many times, please excuse me, it's not my intention to fall into repetition just to get attention. I honestly think this could make for a good discussion, and plan to bring up the subject in the podcast I'm making.
So, I want to start an open discussion on the ethical debate that's been going on for a while now: whether or not games should be taken seriously as more than just a form of interactive media, aside from the fact that they've already been recognized as an art form.
Now, this sounds like a stupid subject at first glance. Of course we should take games seriously, they're our source of income, our passion and the entire subject of the very industry that we're in.
But it goes a lot deeper than that, doesn't it? For years now, games have been on the rise as a giant money pit, being one of the fastest growing industries out there. And yet, we don't see (at least I don't) them getting a lot of attention on mainstream media like television and radio. In fact, on the rare occasion they do get featured, the reporters come off as terribly uninformed and completely alienated from the industry they're trying to accurately represent, creating yet more preconceptions about this industry and it's products in the mainstream public.
With the recent release of both Tomb Raider and God of War: Ascension, the discussion about maturity in video games has flared up again, and has raised the question of whether or not video games should always create so much buzz.
I often find myself thinking "come on people, it's just a video game, stop bitching about it and have fun already"
This is one of the most common arguments I have ever heard from any game developer (that I have talked to) ever, is "it's just a game".
It's just a game.
That very sentence says it all. Game developers themselves use this argument to rationalise unrealistic mechanics in games, because they're fun, but just not realistic. Reviewers use it all the time as well, for example to explain games like Saint's Row 3. "Because videogames" is a quote that Destructoid recently used to explain the trailer for Saint's Row 4.
Now, please understand that I am not saying this is an invalid argument. Realism is fine, but if it gets in the way of fun gameplay, by all means, throw physics and laws of nature out the nearest window. Burn it down. Bury it. Just make a fun game.
However, this does raise a question: what does it mean, exactly, to "take games seriously"?
That is the question I would like to see discussed in this thread, so please, have at it, I'm very curious to see the responses to this
ps: One of the motivations for setting up this discussion (or trying to set it up), is that I am surrounded by people that are not in the games industry, and are in no way hardcore gamers, yet do play games on a regular basis, but are still clearly regarding me, a game developer, in the same way they regard a hardcore gamer. I'm not exactly taking this as an insult, but clearly there is a big difference between a developer and a gamer.
So, I want to start an open discussion on the ethical debate that's been going on for a while now: whether or not games should be taken seriously as more than just a form of interactive media, aside from the fact that they've already been recognized as an art form.
Now, this sounds like a stupid subject at first glance. Of course we should take games seriously, they're our source of income, our passion and the entire subject of the very industry that we're in.
But it goes a lot deeper than that, doesn't it? For years now, games have been on the rise as a giant money pit, being one of the fastest growing industries out there. And yet, we don't see (at least I don't) them getting a lot of attention on mainstream media like television and radio. In fact, on the rare occasion they do get featured, the reporters come off as terribly uninformed and completely alienated from the industry they're trying to accurately represent, creating yet more preconceptions about this industry and it's products in the mainstream public.
With the recent release of both Tomb Raider and God of War: Ascension, the discussion about maturity in video games has flared up again, and has raised the question of whether or not video games should always create so much buzz.
I often find myself thinking "come on people, it's just a video game, stop bitching about it and have fun already"
This is one of the most common arguments I have ever heard from any game developer (that I have talked to) ever, is "it's just a game".
It's just a game.
That very sentence says it all. Game developers themselves use this argument to rationalise unrealistic mechanics in games, because they're fun, but just not realistic. Reviewers use it all the time as well, for example to explain games like Saint's Row 3. "Because videogames" is a quote that Destructoid recently used to explain the trailer for Saint's Row 4.
Now, please understand that I am not saying this is an invalid argument. Realism is fine, but if it gets in the way of fun gameplay, by all means, throw physics and laws of nature out the nearest window. Burn it down. Bury it. Just make a fun game.
However, this does raise a question: what does it mean, exactly, to "take games seriously"?
That is the question I would like to see discussed in this thread, so please, have at it, I'm very curious to see the responses to this
ps: One of the motivations for setting up this discussion (or trying to set it up), is that I am surrounded by people that are not in the games industry, and are in no way hardcore gamers, yet do play games on a regular basis, but are still clearly regarding me, a game developer, in the same way they regard a hardcore gamer. I'm not exactly taking this as an insult, but clearly there is a big difference between a developer and a gamer.
Replies
There's a lot of neat stuff out there, and a lot of games are doing great things to push them as a medium for things like telling stories, selling a message, and generally being a mature form of art and entertainment, but we're still not there.
Part of the problem is that nobody really knows how to make games yet because nobody is sure what games are good at doing. Sure, we can do advanced, automated versions of chess (DOTA, for example), or a simulated hide-and-seek or paintball (basically any shooter game ever made), or good representations of football (sports games and other competitive stuff), but we're all basically just making a bunch of stuff that could be done more effectively as sports or movies.
For a long period, movies were basically just plays on film. They had a bit more freedom to change the stage, but that's essentially all they are. Now we have movies that have car chases, special effects, simulated cast members that number in the thousands, close ups, long shots, moving cameras, slow-motion, and all kinds of other stuff that would be impossible to sell on a stage. Movies have matured and people are aware of how to make them.
The same can't be said of games. The technology simply isn't mature yet, the people making them are essentially amateurs and enthusiasts, nobody knows what "works" in a game and what doesn't, there's very little understanding of what makes a good or bad game in a given genre, they're difficult to make, and people are generally unaware of the limitations for games because we haven't even come close to hitting that wall yet. Video games have not matured yet.
For more consumer/mainstream, look at the work of Thatgamecompany, specifically Journey.
Its out there and growing. You just have to know where to look and have a passion about expanding our artform beyond just "fun".
to the second reaction in this thread: i was not really talking about the maturity pertaining to the evolution of the game industry towards a form of the industry where the film industry is today, but rather about the maturity of the content, in relation to taking that content seriously;
a lot of times, when video games get featured in the media, the article is about one specific negative thing, whether it's censorship legislation, MMORPG addictions, an FPS player running wild, some murdering lunatic saying he got his inspiration from games... and that has created a very negative view of games in people that don't play them, which is a lot of people still.
and so, if we are to be taken seriously, what argument do we need?
that is really the questions i'm trying to ask here
what is the argument that says that the entertainment industry, video games and interactive media as a whole should be taken more seriously than they are.
I do realise though that inherently, a source of relaxation and fun is not taken seriously, because taking things seriously, by definition, eliminates fun.
so this is the dilemma this question poses: we are an industry that is generating billions in revenue and yet we do not take ourselves seriously? Or am I missing the ball completely here?
how the technology isnt matured yet , with smarphones, social media and stuff like that. that, its what common people definition of "technology".
unless your definition of technology is graphical technology, advanced shader etc etc.
are most gamer still even still care on that kind of technology ?
even games like Blood Brothers with makes 50 billion yen( 500 mil USD)revenue this quarter.
That kinda proves that you dont need fancy graphic to make succesfull game dont you think ?
MaVcart
I think when smartTV takes over regular TV, games are eventually getting attention from mainstream crowd, since games,TV,internet will be included in one package.
Now , i know a lot of ppl here hates smartTV, smartphones,smartwhatever..
i actually kinda iritated myself lol. but still , that imo thats where industry moves to.
also edited : nooo why do you edit your post, now my response not even relevant anymore sigh.
Film and theater are the two parallels people frequently try to make, and we even mimic a lot of the production and studio concepts that evolved in Hollywood (for better or worse). But for all the useful knowledge we can pull from those fields, I think leaning on them or trying to draw too many connections is actually a really bad idea because they entirely lack something that is fundamental to games: interactivity.
Film, theater, novels, those are entirely one-way artforms. The creators have nearly total control over how the audience experiences the finished product. Which lends itself well to carefully crafted and tightly woven stories, plots, and presentations. And so that kind of creation has become the focus of those artforms, and doing it really well became sort of the the lofty goal of people who do those things. Shakespeare and The Godfather only work because the audience can't make Banquo stab Macbeth in the face in Act I, or have Michael Corleone say "screw this" and join the FBI to fight against his father and the family.
But the only real parallel interactive entertainment has is tabletop roleplaying, where the players can significantly influence back the other direction and change the story.
We've mastered simulations pretty well with games (flight sims, sports games, driving games) because those are recreations of activities and aren't really narrative driven, and we can keep their scope narrow enough to handmake the vast majority of what is needed for a comprehensive experience.
But for narrative entertainment, until we start really digging into truly dynamic story creation and fully adaptive, cohesive plot development, we're not really flexing our format's muscles to their fullest. That kind of thing is going to take some pretty incredible advances in AI and a lot of skinned knees in failed attempts, though. It's also going to make the scope of projects grow exponentially. It's a massive undertaking already to make all the content needed for a AAA title that only follows a tightly controlled corridor story. I kind of suspect that expanding the scope of that to make everything a dynamically created narrative - and the world it needs to happen in - could rapidly exceed what we can feasibly tackle. In fact, that's pretty quickly getting into holodeck and other sci-fi territory.
The one way I can see it working is if instead of hand-creating everything needed, our industry starts creating a massive content database that games can pull from. And we'd need to drastically change our content creation process to author much more modular and parametic components that could be stitched together by the storytelling / world creation AI. But then we'd also need to do a metric ass-ton of tagging and logic hooks for it to know how to put them together.
Plan B is to release an SDK and let players make what they want if they want something that isn't there out of the box. Gabe Newell mentioned that in one of his recent speeches (gamifying the creation of games).
It's really important to me that I don't across as a bitter person, btw, because I'm not. I'm just genuinely interested in why we aren't further down the line than we are right now (NOT technologically!), again, considering the revenue we generate.
as for the question itself, I think the games industry is a contradiction in itself. On the one hand you have this very serious, corporate world that devolves around billions of dollars and is run by serious men in suits and a board of directors. (oddly enough, not so Valve, though they prove by existing that it's possible to run a multi billion dollar business without the need for a pyramid) Though, even that is changing with the emerging landscape of indie games.
on the other hand we have the product that this very serious industry is creating, that doesn't take itself seriously. Serious games are shunned by big companies because they have failed so many times (with a few exceptions, as is always the case), and it takes really good storytelling (uncharted, mass effect, halo,... I could go on) to take yourself seriously as a game, and even then, it remains, and always will be, a form of entertainment, which inherently eliminates seriousness as such.
as for garagebay9's suggestion of creating a repository: I would oppose that, since it would flood the market with games that look the same. (not pointing any fingers) That said, Gabe's suggestion is an interesting one. On the other hand, do we really want to do this?
yet another question there that needs answering, and another contradiction in our industry. In fact the further along this line of thinking you go, the more contradictions you come across, or so at least the smoke coming out of brain right now is indicating.
If you have an AI that basically mimics a human imagination with storytelling mechanics, unless you keep it on a pretty tight leash, you're ultimately going to have to figure out a way to back it up with game content for everything a human can potentially imagine... or some really smart people will need to at least figure out a way to fake it and make it seem like you've built everything. A massive constantly expanding repository of "stuff" seems like the closest, fastest compromise to "build everything imaginable".
This is just gaming being used as a scapegoat in the same way that comic books and violent movies are. This is very different from taking games seriously as a medium of artistic expression.
I was thinking technology more in the sense of how it's used to make games well. A lot of the tech used in movie making, for example, is pretty transparent to the viewer. Most people can't tell what kind of camera or film you're using when making a movie, and most people don't even realize that set/crowd extensions happen in modern movies, but they're both just a couple of the very important things that filmmakers have to consider when making movies these days (if they're applicable).
In the same way, a lot of things are transparent to most players, such as texture compression algorithms, various post processes, and what kind of anti-aliasing you're using. These, however, are very important considerations when making games, and they're things that are currently very tech-heavy solutions. If you were going to compare them to movies, you could say that a lot of game development is like developing your own proprietary film stock and camera for a single movie or studio. That may have been something a studio would want to do in the early days of filmmaking (just as an example of something that could potentially happen), but nowadays they all use similar equipment.
On another thread, with something that has such perceived value with at least some number of people, and the ability to reinforce or critique certain pieces of culture and values, there will be influence of at least a subtle kind. But as usual, games are the empty canvas, just depends on what we wish to paint on it, and who will listen and internalize.
this implies though, that artists are going to start losing jobs because they're not as needed anymore; because I guarantee you that once the big guys smell a way to save up on tons of money by laying off a bunch of artists and just creating the game with readily available, pre-made assets, they will do so, and they will do so vigorously.
that's an over-dramatisation of a situation that probably will not present itself any time soon, but still, something to think about.
to come back on the initial discussion: I think the question in itself might be a contradiction and is not possible to answer, since the answers to it are never entirely correct, at least not the ones I can come up with.
so, let me re-pose my question in another format.
Do you think, as a developer, that the people behind the games should get more attention, and if so, how should we direct that attention?
I am personally convinced that yes, more attention should be given to the hard working people that actually make the product, in this case this is really applicable to the Life of Pi situation with Rythm and Hues; people that worked their asses off for months were put on the street for their trouble, and this same thing, happened to the guys from Aliens: Colonial Marines. It's a different situation, but really it's comparable at some base level.
as for JadeEyePanda's reply: thanks for bringing that up, because I was argueing with myself over that very same thing.
It's also not why I made this thread; I think it's an interesting question, but personally I just like the industry and I don't care that other people don't, as long as I get to do what i love for a living.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af9M8llS9JA#t=5m0
Should we get attention? No. But again, it's at that frustrating point where it's neither commendable or abhorrent that we do.
As a strange aside, somewhere in the bowels of NASA, someone is disappointed that space programs doesn't have a large mindshare in the general public as much as game developers.
Compare to a game, where interactivity is a necessity; it ceases to be a game if it has no interactivity. All my responses have to be calculable or thought of by the designer. If a character asks me what can change the nature of a man, I get a list of options that's it. A book has as many interpretations as it has readers, this allows for 16 answers and no more. I'm only allowed to have the designer's thoughts, not my own.
Look at it this way: nobody has ever made a game about love. You can't simulate it. Can you still call it an artistic medium if it can't even be about that, which every third-rate singer can?
Vr-tech is advancing pretty darn quickly so once the user has true presence within a game, i can see it taking off rapidly.
Look at the newest .Hack, yes it's a anime movie but the principle of another tangible virtual world within our own with true user presence is something of fairy-tales and witchcraft! Once technology and modern society is at that level or bridging to that level, will games be taken seriously.
To be short, once someone can invest personal, monetary and emotional value in a "game" then they will be take seriously. The current market for "serious games" is limited in a sense that there are only few positions of value where the players compete as they would in any other sporting event. It's a start but not entirely in the right direction, so hopefully we'll see a proper shift in both design, perception and technology.
Careful, we're getting into some serious intellectual and philosophical heavy-lifting territory if we're debating whether interpretation changes the actual event. :poly142:
You've got a great point about artist intent not always being audience perception... Heck, if that wasn't the case, I doubt we'd hear Green Day's Time of Your Life played at wedding receptions all the time (total missing-of-the-point if you listen carefully to the lyrics).
That said, I still maintain that there aren't really any well-developed interactive artform parallels to video games. Experimental theater, choose-your-own adventure books, maybe. Tabletop RPGs are probably closest, but they depend on leveraging a human imagination as the storyteller and a two-way feedback link between it and the players, who have even more influence on what happens (unless the gamemaster's a dick).
Your example of "pick 3 response options off a list" is a symptom of the problem we're talking about, where the player is, honestly, just pushing one of three switches to choose one of three predetermined paths down a fixed script. You can get the same thing by swapping DVDs or VHS tapes in a choose-your-own-adventure movie if you really wanted to and it would be basically the same result.
But with cinema and theater and literature, the audience can't change what the artist put down.
Bach's Chaconne will always have the same notes and dynamics and rhythms; if you change those, it isn't Bach's Chaconne anymore.
Romeo and Juliet always make a dumb decision in the end.
Han always shoots fir - nevermind, bad example. :poly136:
You get the idea. Video games are one of the few artforms where the audience's actions can start causing wild changes with it still being the same piece of art and not something derivative or separate. But we've done so much mimicking and drawing from artforms that don't have that capability that we've progressively narrowed our works down to being nearly non-interactive - exhibit A, that video of the Black Ops intro level where the game damn near played itself and the guy recording it only had to press the fire button a couple of times to complete a hard-scripted sequence. That was a huge production in a medium that has so much more potential and yet it was basically nothing more than a movie with a semi-mobile camera.
That is an example of one of probably the least effective uses of the medium.
Now imagine games where in that same intro, the player could decide to defect to other side at the beginning of the level... and the story began writing itself from there. That is what we COULD do with this medium, if we put our minds to it.
I'll have to strongly disagree ! Just take games like Super Meat Boy and Portal. Their silent era equivalents would be the original Donkey Kong and Breakout/Tetris ; games got a long way since then. These two recent titles are perfect illustrations of games being great at being games, as opposed to trying to be something else. They will also age perfectly since they sit besides the zone of "trying to be next gen" (whatever that means). They just do what they need to do, in their own cohesive bubble.
David Cage can rant and complain for hours, that won't change the fact that Valve didn't wait for gazillions of polygons to make HL2, which blows Heavy Rain out of the water on all levels - be it gameplay *and* mature storytelling.
Another great game being great at being a game is DayZ - such a pure role playing experience totally based on emergent gameplay. It doesn't really matter how ugly it is. In a way I feel like its creators take games much, much more seriously (and understand them much better) than anyone trying to make the next interactive video game movie!
Just my 2 cents!
1) I don't believe there can be such a thing as a story in a game. A game has to be interactive. It can only be played in the present. That much is obvious. A story is a telling or re-telling of events that have taken place (in the mind of the author) (the definition is Brian McDonald's. "Stories are not lived but told" says Louis Mink (1970). Hayden White, 1981, has a similar notion. When something happens, that's a sequence of events. It becomes a story only when you filter the events by telling it. If a story is a telling of things past and a game is events present, a story in a game is a contradictio in terminis.
2) More options isn't necessarily better. The holodeck isn't a game; it's a highly manipulable environment. In the best games, like chess, tetris or Spacechem the rules are highly oppressive. A game isn't about doing what you want, it's about completing an objective through rules. A Sudoku loses all value whatsoever once the numbers don't need to add up anymore. And I would argue that Tetris with an extra restrictive rule (say, a limited amount of actions) would be a better change than an extra liberating rule (such as the ability to choose your next block, or to delete any line despite it not being full).
3) Just because something reacts doesn't mean the reaction is meaningful. Again, all choices you make in a game have to be pre-made or calculable; I like to think my imagination is worth more than that.
to kind of continue down along the lines of the conversation though, I would like to react to a couple things:
firstly, I agree with Zwebbie up to a certain point, in that I do indeed think that games offer a predetermined set of paths (if you're lucky you have more than one path), and true interactivity can only come from a true freedom of choice.
there is something to be said for predetermining a path though.
There is no way the average user will come up with an epic story like the mass effect trilogy or the uncharted series, if faced with true interactivity and freedom of choice. For this, scripted events and clever level design are made to trick the user into thinking they have the freedom to choose, but don't have any motivation to do anything other than what is offered to them, in most cases because anything they do other than progress through the storyline ends in the death of the main character.
as to what Garagebay9 said, there is something to be said for that as well; adding interactivity to movies, theater and music, changes the music in such a fundamental level that it's not the same music anymore.
the question i would like to submit here is, do we really want to allow people to change the content of a piece of art that has been painstakingly crafted to be fun to play and look beautiful the way it is, and just the way it is?
I think no. For one, i know that Michelangelo's david would not be as impressive a sculpture if passersby could change his pose, or add or remove clothes to him, or even change his facial expression.
I know that vincent van gogh's sunflowers would not be as beautiful if framed the way any ordinary person would frame it.
I know that the Uncharted Series would not be as good of a story if anyone that played it could at any point decide that they would rather not risk their lives in pursuit of some legendary buried city, but rather live out their remaining days with the people they love.
I could go on for some time, but you get what I mean.
Also, this "true interactivity" thing, where AI would make it's own decisions... there's something to be said for it, but again, would the game really be the same if all the NPC's would react differently than the way the writers intended them to?
I think the true holy grail for games lies somewhere in between true interactivity and guidance by the artist; guide the player towards the story the artist has created so painstakingly, but do so in a manner the player doesn't notice he or she is being guided.
Some games are coming really close to this kind of immersion, but I think we're only on the precipice of what we can do to immerse the player into the game, with hardware like the Oculus Rift coming out, and PC's becoming more powerful every single day.
So yes, we are looking to an exciting future for video games.
I'm going to have to disagree with your first point (even though i completely get where you're coming from). The beauty of games is that stories can be told in the present and they can be interactive, as an industry we have not figured out how to do this correctly, and it will probably be a few years before someone gets it right. While them quotes are interesting, they are not entirely applicable as they are in a pre-gaming era, and i believe a properly designed and written game can redefine storytelling, the same way films redefined storytelling from stage shows(great example is watching a musical production of les mis and the Hollywood version- the Hollywood version is better imo).
Games as a form of media have a lot of maturing to do before they will be seen by the masses as a "serious form of interactive media" and i see the innovations and major breakthroughs coming from indie teams because the gamble of making a game as a AAA studio which breaks the norm is too risky. The attitude of its just a game is also what is holding back the industry, because that is not the point, for example the scene in tomb raider which had alot of controversy surrounding it was integral to the story and character development, which is the answer to people complaining, not its just a game, enjoy it.
I don't think anyone will have an answer to what is it to take games seriously, because at the minute the industry is too young for anyone to know the answer to this yet. I do think that the closest we have come is telltales the walking dead and journey, because them games made you feel something
Apparently he said that. The point I'm using it to make is that to ask whether or not it can be serious is to pretty much conform to the notion that it is not because there are others that do not and as a collective label it such. I prefer to simply decide for myself what it serious and valuable, or even what could be considered intelligent mature content.
John Cleese also said in a seminar that "There's a difference between being serious and being solemn." Something that could be considered seriously does not have to be what is considered mature, polite, or intelligently inspired.
I'm more than happy to keep calling these things Video Games but I do think that the use of the term 'Game' stunts the conversation. It forces perspectives and allows people to talk at cross-purposes. For example Zwebbies comments at first prompted a disagreeing response out of me and I assume others; really though when he is talking about games he was referring to games in their purest form, where the components and rules of a game can only have meaning unto themselves.
But for a lot of us who know games (and talking in the very context of this thread) are familiar with video games and their capacity to merge multiple media into one give the term another meaning: any interactive media based on a system of rules and goals. These types of games can now incorporate objects like video, sound, story, mimetic interaction, role play etc. This opens up analysis of the medium exponentially, where analysis pure games in themselves would be bound to their efficiency and cohesion; with possibilities to reachingly discover meaning through metaphor or social trends through history.
It might sound like I'm trying to cop-out this debate into "well what does serious mean?" and "what do games mean?" but I'm really just bringing the thought in that this will always be in a state of flux.
I was actually kind of hoping for a reply like this
It's really interesting that C.S. Lewis said that, since it carries so much weight in a field that he was not even remotely talking about.
I think we can conclude from this that there is no real solid answer, as the answer depends entirely on the person that is giving it, to such a degree that it varies wildly.
In support of the definition of game I use, think of this: a lot things that aren't games can become games. I think we'll all agree that reading Homer's Iliad isn't a game. Trying to get through it faster than someone else is a game. Walking isn't a game. Trying to walk faster than someone else is part of the Olympic Games. The difference is in the artificial conflict, defined by rules, resulting in a quantifiable outcome.
And in support for my definition of story: playing Tetris, there's obviously no story; I don't think anyone would argue that. Recalling how you played Tetris for an hour only to finally be defeated by a streak of 3 + shaped blocks in a row is a story. The game is a set of potential events. A story can come out of it, but isn't in it.
What's important to realise, in my opinion anyway, is that what we call a video game isn't 100% game. Just because it's called a game doesn't mean all of its content is a lot isn't. One can imagine a movie that is 45 minutes of black screen with Mozart's Requiem played in the background; One can imagine a movie in which the full contents of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov scrolls by Star Wars intro style; voilà, movies are objectively better than both music and texts, because they can contain both! Except that I think we'd call a black screen with the Requiem music instead of a movie and we'd call Dostoevsky's words scrolling by a text instead of a movie.
Why, then, do we insist on calling cutscenes or non-interactive sections parts of games? A game is rule based interaction; if that isn't happening, it isn't being a game at that very moment. None of Uncharted or Half-life's story is told through gameplay, it's told through watching other characters talk and act. Most of what we call video games are a story and a game, but not a story through a game. You may have heard of Jason Rohrer's Passage; if not, play it, it's not two MB in size and doesn't take more than five minutes to play. It doesn't have a story; merely a world, mode of interaction, and rules. Having played through it and telling someone how you took on life's journey with a woman, and though being together in relationship limited your ability to achieve all things you may have wanted to, you're still glad you went through it together that's a story. But it's told afterwards, by you and not by the designer (although he certainly did influence your feelings, the eventual story is yours.) The problem with such games is that while they're as close as we've got to being pure games while still getting a meaningful message across is that because of their purity, they're essentially nothing more than simulation. Can we simulate the human condition? I don't think so. Passage is interesting, but it's a shallow representation of love (so is Rod Humble's The Marriage, a similar attempt. For more on this kind of games, see Jonathan Blow's 2007 Montreal talk (in general, I'd say all Blow's lectures are is interesting if you want to take games seriously.))
What video games do is juggle story and games. They're addictive, they lpay up your vanity, they're fun, and I have to admit that the games I've had most pleasure with aren't the ones that were purest in being games. But those aren't the ones I admire most, and I think 'taking games seriously' requires thought about structure more than just seeing what's fun and what's not. Story and game are juggled; but while juggling is interesting to watch, it does require that the things being juggled are balls (bad pun intended).
I also think that is an important point for this kind of topic since as games can only exist when played, that people who consider the activity of play to be childish or separable from serious themes and important work. Once again I can point to that quote by C. S. Lewis, as it is odd to consider video games the lesser mature because one can (and must) play them like a sport or a toy is to misunderstand the nature of being an mature adult. Even more so when activities like listening to music, going to dinner parties, watching film or plays, producing commercial art, playing the stock market, or debating in court are seen as valued and mature activities where playing in some way or form is necessary.
I think there's so much confusion on the industry and individual's terminology of the word "games" as to what we use to coin our industry as "videogames". For me the latter term is even an ambiguous, abbreviated term (coming close to a slang) of what art form we have in here.
I strongly agree that this thing we call videogames is still relatively younger than our other older brother's/sister's medium. Even the business and creative sides of the videogame industry is still in polar opposites of each other. Heck even the products themselves is in extreme opposites (eg. Bejeweled vs COD vs Heavy Rain) And with the influx of growth in technology and mass media we, the videogame guys, seems to have a double-edged, advantage/disadvantage of how all of us perceive in the areas as business industry, artform, and public opinion. We are moving so fast now that we just grab the next closest thing we can come up of - Hence the quick response of "Its just a game." I will not dare to answer if we have to take videogames seriously as a whole, since this is so layered in definition that for one such young industry, will open a big can of worms.
The thing is, in my opinion, the industry we call Videogames has yet to be solidly defined.