"In games like Halo 2 or 3, where you sometimes can't even understand what the characters are saying and the plot is needlessly convoluted, wouldn't the experience be better with no story at all?"
No, not at all. I played Halo for the story and I would be a very shallow game without it.

I played Halo for the story as well. However, the story in Halo 2/3 was absolutely aweful. Brandon is right about that.

*sigh*. I would gladly work for half the salary I'm being paid now if it meant working on a "grown up" game.

I agree with Jacek.

Why to blame developers all the time? We really prefer complex, grow up games!

This aspiration to 'art' really irks me when situated in comparison to the fundamental attributes of other mediums.

"Games need a moving story to be art."

"Games need complex characters to be art."

"Games need atmospheric music and stunning graphics to be art."

What they all ignore, in a ridiculous oversight, is the fact that what makes games compelling as a medium is the possibility for interaction.

If you want to make game art, make a game that plays beautifully.

Chess isn't an art because of the shape of the king, or the look of the board. It isn't art because of the narrative subtext of war.

It is art because it offers the potential of deep and satisfying play.

Focus on creating deep, engaging play, and you have made your art.

Maybe put the cinema envy to the side. Or get a job in the film industry.

Piotr - well, it's not a blaming situation...I write these editorials to developers specifically, so that's who I am addressing - but it's clearly an issue of push and pull between developers, publishers, and marketing - but ultimately the developers do have the power. They don't have the money, but they are the ones actually making the stuff. It is up to them how it turns out!

I should add that I by no means am discounting the value that a good story, interesting characters or fantastic music/graphics can add to a game. Of course, they can all add substantially to the experience.

But if a game plays woefully yet has an intriguing story, I'm hitting escape. If it has an awful story but plays great, I'll be hitting escape after realising I should've quit the game a few hours ago.

Great points; I'm very hopeful about the future.

One minor contention, though: I disagree with the notion that story is not useful (Halo). This is an idea that is also prevalent in the indie gaming scene, where designers attempt to express deep themes of humanity through abstraction (Flow, The Marriage, etc). While I think there is a place for that, many developers are missing out on the chance to use concrete story to communicate ideas. Innovation can happen on the mechanics level OR the story level.

Woah, Brice, if you think I am saying story is not useful, you are misreading me. I think it's REALLY useful, just usually done wrong.

COD4 is an example of a great game made better by integration of intelligently placed dialog and scripted events. It's what brings that game from the level of "game" to the level of "experience." so I am definitely not saying story is useless.

Steven - no cinema envy here, I went to film school but am purposefully in the game industry. It's just for ease of comparison. If you disagree that games need more outside influence and to deal with deeper subjects, that's fine, but honestly I think you're trying to argue the same point I am, you just don't like my examples.

I do think that many games do need a moving story or complex characters to be art - if they have them. But in their absence, like Halo 2 as I mentioned, that's when they need an even greater emphasis on elegant interaction - but ideally you have a situation where all of them come together, and I'll cite COD4 there once more.

Brandon,

With regard to developers being the ones who actually "make the stuff", the recurring story of my employment has been that my boss, whoever that is at any given moment, never, ever, ever listens to either me or any of my colleagues. At least not with regard to the big picture, because if you want to advise them on whether that Gatling gun should have six or seven barrels, then sure, go ahead. Maybe they'll let you choose the camouflage pattern, too.

One of my previous employers has suffered from a turnover rate of some thirty-forty per cent a year, AND HE STILL HASN'T GOT THE MESSAGE.

I've been trying to improve the projects I've been working on for all my "career", if you excuse the expression. And I don't mean some idealistic revolution, turning everything into art etc. because I'm not credible enough for that. I mean practical things, like working smarter rather than harder, or trying not to go the path of least resistance all the time. I've already lost two jobs because of that, and I'm on a fast lane to the hat trick. I've done all I could to improve the project I'm working on right now, and all I've gotten in return is my boss telling me I'm being a minimalist who's just not giving his job enough thought. Frankly, the only thing left to do is to quit the job before I'm fired. I'll probably do just that as soon as my contract expires, and I'm quite sure it's not going to change anything. Another dozen or two of millions of dollars will go down the drain, wasted on another derivative bullshit shooter nobody's going to remember in three years' time, while at the same time I'll go to work in a bank or something, because I don't have the two dozen of thousands of dollars I would need before I could go indie.

Think anyone at work is going to help me? No such luck. People just want to live in peace and comfort. One of my coworkers used to complain a lot, then they gave him a rise. Do you think he started to save in case he had to risk his job for some greater purpose? No, he took a loan and bought a fancy car. Now he can't afford to quit or get fired no matter what, because the loan would kill him.

For all of my so-called "career" I've been in a position where I complain a lot and everybody seems to agree with me, but only until I tell them "so let's get together and do something about this mess". Then suddenly everybody starts to feel it's more important to "respect your job". And the more they earn, the less they care about the quality of their work. It's easy to quit a minimum wage job, but it's hard to give up those summer trips to Egypt you've gotten so used to. Last time I actually managed to get someone involved in an improvement effort, it was only because I promised them they would stay anonymous.

Maybe you think the publisher or the industry at large cares about any of this. If that's the case, then answer this: do you know who I am? Of course you don't. I'm a nobody. And so is the guy sitting next to me at work. And the guy next to him. We're irrelevant. We're expendable. There's plenty of frat boys who think GameDev is going to be their dream job one day, because it will let them play Halo all day (or at least during those oh-so-romantic crunch nights). There's a lot of people who speak C++, and a lot of people who don't run away from XSI or Maya, and it's not at all that hard to learn, say, UnrealEd. Any naysayer like me can be easily replaced by someone who's going to be happy to be finally working for [insert name of a minor industry celebrity here].

What about creativity, you ask? Well, I assure you a lot of people think God of War is creative enough.

Brandon - Sorry my rant wasn't actually directed at you, though I see how it could read as such. I was merely using the trajectory of the comments section as a platform to attack the notion that games *require* great story or characters; I agree that we're arguing for the same ideal.

Brandon, I agree with your wholeheartedly and Steven Conway as well. While I like games like Chess for their elegant design, I'd also like to see a game with a thesis like, say, the movie JFK.

One point I'd contest is this: "Just as the movie 300 appeals to frat boys..."

300 is for fratboys on the surface, but I think the Persian demonization was artistically brilliant. 300 is a literal portrayal of a historical event from the Spartan perspective -- to Spartans, the Persians WERE beasts.

300 is the perfect example of media as both artistic and entertaining at the same time. Movies have their cake and eat it too, and so can games.

"A Dickens- or Fitzgerald-inspired game, properly handled, could yield amazing results"

I've seen a lot of comments like this in the past year or two...Let's take a moment to analyze.

"Oliver Twist: The Game": Well, one of the strongest points of Oliver Twist was all of the complex events and separate stories that wove together by the end. In game form, you can either:

1. Give the player control. As soon as he makes a meaningful decision, he breaks the carefully planned story and destroys what the developer was trying to create.

2: Allow the player to interact with some aspects of the game but force him to walk the linear story path. (i.e. Final Fantasy without the fighting or leveling)

My problem with many of the essays about how games need to have the same range of subjects as books or movies is that they're ignoring the strengths and weaknesses of games and trying to turn them into movies. We don't need a "one-medium-fits-all" solution.

Call me shallow, but in general, I like to see games as just that..."Games." Basketball and Chess have no deep emotional meaning. However, they both have mechanics that allow a large amount of interaction, planning, depth, and most importantly, control. Both offer a fulfilling experience simply by the virtue of their mechanics.

A game is about interaction, which means that you should give players both choices and reasonable consequences.
Create mechanics that have room for creativity and depth, give players the ability to make choices and see consequences based on those mechanics, and you have exactly what games should be.

I won't argue that there's room for innovation and plenty of room for good non-violent subject matter, but this is one of those many articles that makes an attack on games without a hint of a viable solution. Vague references to "social issues" and famous literary works are used to create an appearance of something meaningful in an article that really offers nothing.

Am I the only one who sees a huge contradiction here?

We DO need to mature as a medium, I agree whole heartedly, but your examples show a move in the opposite direction.

Take the story out of Halo? Why don't we just make Doom.

It's the very presence of the narrative that makes Halo a more mature game than those of yester-year. It has character, motive, and emotional-investment.

I agree completely with your idea of showing the story instead of telling it. An example comes to mind... 300!

I don't like the Japanese style of "bog them down with story" any more than you do, but games like Final Fantasy hit on a much broader range of emotions than BioShock ever did.

I suspect we shouldn't think about a game adaptation of a book in terms of translating its story into gameplay. However, you can translate the book's setting, and you can translate the process behind its story. Processes are to games what stories are to books.

In a fortunate coincidence, books often attain a deeper meaning when the instances they present in the form of stories can be generalized into some kind of a process (or a model thereof). There's actually a decent industry-related example of how this works.

There's a book by Andrzej Sapkowski, called "Wiedźmin", or "Witcher". Essentially, it's a leisurely cycle of novels and shortstories about a professional monster hunter who also happens to be a mutant. On the surface, these are just adventure stories, but the author keeps drifting toward a single question: "what is a monster?". For instance, the main character meets a dragon and a vampire who aren't monsters. He also meets a lot of humans who are. The protagonist himself is often considered a monster, because he's a mutant with superhuman abilities, and people are afraid of him. But we get to know him well, and we learn he's actually a very virtuous guy. In the long run, the series turns out to explore such topics as intolerance, intercultural barriers, and racism. Intolerance is shown as a process; for example: prejudice causes violence, which is answered with even more violence, which in turn causes even more prejudice, and so on.

The game doesn't try to retell the story. Its own story is new, but follows the same principles. Its main theme is, again, racism. The player gets the opportunity to witness an ethnic conflict spiraling out of control, is forced to support one side of the conflict or another, and then has to deal with the consequences. Player also gets to know the main villain very well, and can develop a theory as to how he's become a race-obsessed fanatic. Much in the vein of the original book, the game suggests to the player, that the villain hasn't always been so, and that he hasn't become a villain because he was simply "evil". Another principle of the book is the claim that there's no clear distinction between good and evil, there are only lesser and greater evils. Some major quests in the game follow this principle as well.

The setting was also translated. The town most of the game takes place in was taken from the book. Player meets the protagonist's old comrades (some of them, anyway). Many dialogues are outright copied from books and put in new contexts. Obviously, there's a lot of monster hunting in the game, and one of major fights recreates the one you can see in the introduction. It's a similar fight against a very similar monster, but it's put in a new context, because it's a different event. And the player can choose whether to kill or save the "enchanted princess". Both choices can be defended on moral grounds, if you really want to.

You're probably going to have to take my word for it, because I don't think there's an English translation of the original novel, but I do believe the game is a valid adaptation. It's not perfect gameplay-wise, but it handles the book's theme in such a way that I don't think developers should be ashamed.

I wonder if a dose of game history research would be in order. There has been some very good development out there. Some of the WW2 games for example have enlightened me about parts of that history I would never have known about. Maybe the industry suffers sometimes from the same thing the movie industry suffers from. Look at the Die Hard movies that slowly went downhill .. the sequel syndrome. The same thing seems to have happened to the Brothers in Arms series. Where the first two brilliantly showed how difficult combat actually is. The most recent one dumped all that. I've seen a few people posting on forums saying things like "at last I can go solo and attack the enemy single handed". A shame, as BIA actually showed why that is so stupid !

More so, what games are we talking about ? Some are pure switch off material, while some others are advanced RPG's with complex story lines.

I think Mr Sheffield (BTW that's not you in the photo I assume!) hits a good point with the smash everything in your path attitude in games. It does lead to frustration if you learn this and then hit a real life obstacle that can't be "blown away". But is it really the job of games to "educate" or even be moral ? That's why we have classifications, that's why we have schools and parents. Maybe developers wringing their hands over the moral issues in their games is not their job, although of course pure social responsibility is the concern of everyone ... but that should be common sense.

Let's face it; this is a battle against mainstream games. The people responsible for producing the majority of videogames today will hear an opinion like this (if they do at all), say, "Nice ideas" and then go back to kowtowing to their publisher and living their comfortable lives financed by their comfortable acceptance that games are merely fun toys that make them a lot of money…and feed some backward-looking retro-fetish involving their early childhood experiences with their first Atari.
The people who are trying to make videogames more meaningful and socially constructive (I’ll leave ‘artistic’ out of this for now) know all this. We haven’t much money, but we have the burning passion to use games as a medium of expression and maybe, just maybe, a means to comment on the human condition. An article like this may be dead on, but listing these tips and suggestions will not change anything. The devs with the power don’t care about anything beyond making games fun or strategic exercises, because that is what game mean to them. Talking to these people about deeper themes, social context and artistic merit is pointless because for the most part THESE PEOPLE HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. These are not storytellers, not great communicators or people with any wisdom or pain to express to society. They are toy manufacturers.
Asking an empty glass for something refreshing is pointless. Perhaps there’s a change from the inside that’s waiting to happen. I doubt it, as long as publishers and executives pull the strings. This is a movement that will have to come from the outside, from people who have come into games with completely new reasons, with something to say. This is my generation. We see videogames reaching these new heights and the best of us will starve to say what we feel compelled to. That’s what it takes. This videogame revolution, aiming to change society’s perception of the medium and use it as the voice of a generation will come from ideologically driven individuals. I’m sure the mainstream industry will continue to thrive, as it has its audience (and I’m in no way saying entertainment and artistic merit are incompatible). However, this new group of aspiring videogame creators will create their own culture and fight for survival and acceptance despite the old guard.

@Jacek: Glad to hear you liked The Witcher. The English version of the book Blood of Elves will be available next year, so a positive consequence of the game is that there is now a demand for the original source material.

This editorial came out in print a while ago, I suppose. I believe I argued similar points in my article for Gamasutra called Towards More Meaningful Games. There are several people championing the cause of narrative design and its importance. It will certainly be interesting in the coming years to see how their games turn out.

Jacek, as to your difficulty getting your bosses to listen, I agree totally! That's why more developers need to be complaining, so that when you say "ok let's do something," then it gets done. That's the aim of most of my editorials, though it's impossible to know if they're successful. I do believe that developers hold the power, if they can wield it properly.

and for this: "I suspect we shouldn't think about a game adaptation of a book in terms of translating its story into gameplay. However, you can translate the book's setting, and you can translate the process behind its story."

I just want to confirm that this is indeed what I was getting at.

300 is only for frat boys. damnit, which one should i pledge?

am i the only one out of the millions of people who saw who actually loved it? great movie.

oh...uh...carry on.

"Every other mainstream media, from books to theatre to movies to comics, has major genre or thematic derivations"

Video games differ from other forms of media. Books, movies and comics have never demanded so much interaction from their audiences; the "author-reader" dynamic that games offer is a completely novel relationship. What makes games great is not necessarily the element of storytelling or how easily players relate to the characters. It's not about how beautifully our sentences are structured as we talk about the virtues of individualism or how hilarious and precise our satirical allegories are. Great games have, since Pong, since Tetris, since Donkey Kong, been about great game mechanics. Look at one of the most popular indie mods in the history of gaming: Counter-Strike. No story. Whatsoever. No characters. Whatsoever.

Spawn. Run. Throw flashbang. Strafe. Turn. Burst fire. Boom Headshot! Find cover. Strafe. Burstfire. Booooom! Heeaadshoooot! Turn. Full auto!!!! Die.

I believe games have benefited from having such narrow thematical scope up to this point. Constructs based on combat and war or criminal underworlds are easier to turn into great games. You have inherent conflict that every player undestands on a fundamental level. Without much in the way of an imagination, you can create time pressure, competition, the need for shrewd tactical thought, problem solving and improvisation, the need for precise coordination. Obviously, in spite of our love for games, some of us wonder if somehow we might be affecting the psyche of the public at large by constantly developing software that encourages (or teaches) gamers to be effective, efficient killers, or heartless, calculating strategists. I agree that we are long overdue to see games offering themes that are more substantive, or games that dwell more consistently on a subject matter other than death, war, assassination, carnage. However, until we find a theme that inherently offers ALL the gameplay mechanics I mentioned above, we will be hard pressed to deviate from violence. Or we will see games like World of Goo, which are amorphous in almost every aspect of that word.

I don't think we've cared so much about storytelling until recently (Past 5 years??). Up to this point, "the story" has only been a pretext to jump on Goombas or eat cherries, dots and ghosts. And now, suddenly, Steven Spielberg wants to tell interactive stories (can't blame him). Part of this is because we now have the hardware capable of rendering truly breathtaking environments and believeable characters. Part of this is because we've nailed down a lot of the game mechanics that make a good game and we're ready to move on to accomplishing harder things.

Part of me, however, wants to believe that this is also because more people are entering the game industry hive mind, with perhaps more "hive" and less "mind". And the amount of innovation we see from select members is becoming more dilute publishers are gaining more power to regulate the breadth of our creative daliances. But this doesn't mean that we aren't seeing innovation in the games industry. Innovation is what drives the first few big sellers in any genre (after that, we see seem to see clones for a few years, some of them also becoming very successful, before the next evolution in games).

If I recall correctly, the avant garde (in any medium) have rarely been those to produce the most "popular" works. If you look at popular literature nowadays, Harry Potter, for example, you don't exactly see brilliant social commentary. JK Rowling's books are fun to read, they're popular for their own reasons, but I don't think the Harry Potter series is huge because it has tremendous artistic merits or because the writer is so technically accomplished as... say Flaubert, Vonnegut, Dostoevsky or Hemmingway.

The same goes for most films. Most popular films feature spectacle, attractive cast members, solid acting, good story telling, and more spectacle. When it comes to successful movies, you very rarely see a lot of post-modern criticism or reflections of brilliant self-awareness. If you do, it is usually combined with those other elements. There is a comfortable plateau of metaphysical "depth" with which we have become comfortable. Too deep and you lose audience members in a sea of incomprehensible thought. Too shallow and people regard your work as cheap and meritless. And you almost never see any new revolutions in the use of technique (because we've basically "figured" things out on film). Frankly, I'm not sure Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick would have made it in today's film industry.

Then again, we all know games are different. Games shine when game mechanics are innovative, when they challenge players to think in a completely new way, to engage the mind in ways nobody would have ever thought possible in the days of Dickens and Fitzgerald. And because games have this aspect to them, I would hypothesize that it is definitely feasible to create very big selling, profitable game with a message that isn't diluted by the need to have a wide audience. The problem is creating a balance. If we focus too much on creating a great story, or focusing too much on "teach and entertain", we're not going to have as much a game, but rather a "choose your own adventure" novel. Gamers don't want know that they are playing educational software. Most of them won't give a sh*t about the moral lessons taught in a game about racism, oppression, or greed if the gameplay sucks or the control scheme is funky or the UI is clunky or the boss fights are repetitive or the multiplayer game dynamics are shallow and unbalanced. When it comes to plot, we all know linearity tends to be a big turn-off to players. If we are going to be so paternalistic as to try to teach lessons, something has to be done to give players an element of self-determinism but also allow for lessons to be taught at every turn.

As a member of this "new" generation of game designers (the 18-25 aspiring game dev generation), I think it is definitely possible to combine great game mechanics, great storytelling, and sharp social awareness to create games that double as obvious works of art and alter the public's perception of what it means to be a "gamer". Just don't expect every artful game to be a hit.

You almost got it right, but you went backwards when you said to keep in within the industry.

It's those people, the one's on the outs that have their finger on the pulse.

I personally really liked the Halo story. I really enjoyed the deciphering of the political tension in the alien religious hierarchy. Much of the Halo's religious messages is no surprise though, being that the writer's father was a priest. And religious conflict always makes for good story!

Now I can say that there is no game out there that can give me the same feeling as a movie like, for example, "Shooting Dogs"(a movie based on the Rwanda conflict). But I think that games can eventually reach the point where games can portray heavy messages to an audience without making them fall into the "twitch and shoot" mentality that many modern day game enthusiasts fall into. At the same time, I think the input with a controller makes the player disengage with the experience just as much as it engages them. A movie or book has the audience in a non responsive position, leaving them to just think and analyze the situation the characters are involved in. Games require a higher demand from its audience, requiring input for the title to progress (but that is why it is good to have seamless controls). The "director" also loses control, not allowing the control of the player’s success or failure. While this is an obvious analysis, it shows that falling back on past mediums like books and film to "fix" gaming's story glut is not exactly perfectly transferable.

At the same time, I do not think enough emphasis is put onto the player’s attachment with the titles characters. People crave humanly interaction, and gaming seems to miss this point. Why do you think there are so many people who get hooked to games such as World of Warcraft? Because human interaction, with all its fun and drama, is what make the players feel so connected. Games lack the human emotion and body signal interaction that other mediums have. Why do you think they have the camera in a T.V. drama always zoom in on a characters face just after an event? You see what spoken word cannot explain. One game that I find does a great job with person-to-person interaction is Half Life 2. With excellent writing and facial expressions, the characters are much more attachable, much more real.

But games always have game mechanics to worry about, which is just as important. If you got a game that is unplayable, why would I care for the protagonist not scoring with the ladies and having to get his groceries next Tuesday before the bomb goes boom?

Interesting discussion. My point of view as a game player and only a dabbling game creator is that games are escape. Perhaps Doom was shallow but Doom was a helluvalotta fun to play. Story is a bonus, awakening social awareness through moral themes or portrayal of the human condition can definitely add to the buzz. Think Deus Ex, the conversations with the bartend were awesome. But believing that the games you create influence the morality of the players means that it is time to shut off the computer and go make some friends in the flesh. Games as art is a cool idea but games as a replacement for a social life or a family or real responsibility is ridiculous. My opinion is to second what has already been voiced much more eloquently: kudos to those game designers and developers who can find inspiration in the rich experiences of the real world-at-large, violent or not, or in literature or wherever to break game thematics out of the clone of the clone of last years hit first person shooter. I second the motion that some deeper social themes in games could have some interesting impact on culture in the way of fortifying what we hold to be true but when all is said and done it’s all about the game mechanics that transport the user into escape velocity. Solid game-play, controls that make sense graphics that don’t make the user feel like a shmuck with outdated hardware.

I am just super happy to be working on a creative game/IP with awesome mechanics and as much input as I can stand, in spite of the sacrifices it takes to 'do it indie'.

All the blah, blah blah just reminds me of the over-philosophizing of my late teens.

Bottom line? Games should be about entertainment. Fun.

Brian -- games are different things to different people. They are escape to you, experience to me, challenge to my young cousin, and a visual chatroom to my WoW-addicted friends. The point is not to let our tastes and preconceptions limit the scope of our work. In particular, we shouldn't let the word "game" fool us, because computer games are a special case of something much broader. There's nothing inherently wrong with playing or making games "just for fun", but there may be benefit in seeking other purposes as well.

As for "social responsibilities", it's not about educating people or replacing their friends. It's about taking part in a debate. There are so many important topics, from domestic politics to global warming, and maybe some of them can be shown in a new light if an interactive medium is used. One could think of it as an artistic equivalent of a scientific experiment with real people taking part in it.

It is interesting that there has not (as far as I've seen), been a single video game that is a serious critique of the war in Iraq. Yet all the other major art forms (music, movies, and books) are full of that sort of thing. I realize that part of it is the long life cycle of games (a record can easily be recorded and released in six months, but games are very rarely produced that quickly). But I suspect a more important part of it is management in the industry. What game publisher is willing to release a game that offers a scathing critique of a major political event? In the U.S., according to one of the game's producers, Atari wouldn't release the game Fahrenheit under that name because the *title* sounded similar to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, even though the game was completely unrelated. What if the game had actually been similar in subject matter to the Moore film? There is the obvious reason for this: publishers don't want to court controversy. But there is likely another important reason as well: major players in the video game industry, such as Sony and Vivendi, have major ties to the arms industry, and profit greatly from war. In a sense it's too bad there isn't a thriving independent side to the games industry like there is with music and movies, though there have been a number of well received independent games this year, so maybe we'll be lucky and that is starting to change.

The bottom line is this: tell the people in charge of game publishers--which is to say, people in charge of making money with games--that they need to be more socially engaged or socially responsible, and their eyes will glaze over. If you can find a way to show them that socially responsible games will make them lots of money, then socially responsible games will become common. It's not a lack of capability of devs, it's a lack of interest from money people.

Not holding our breath, we can only expect indies to produce the kind of game Brandon advocates. The big guys won't risk it.

In a way, the question really is, how do we persuade the public to buy socially responsible games *rather than* the latest bang bang shoot'emup? Is that possible?

Gaming is a unique medium only in presentation and mechanics. There is room in the industry for "brainless" games that are just pure fun and escapism as well as socially hard-hitting dramas. I think we've all seen an expansion of the gaming industry over the last 20 years, and not just technologically. We're a long way from Space Invaders and the original Mario Brothers.

Let us not forget, however, that at the end of the day this is an industry, not a collection of non-profit organizations. We need all kinds of games to survive financially. Maybe the Madden series is not sensationally innovative or socially conscious, but it sells like hotcakes; and those profits pay for more innovative projects like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space.

We may not appreciate the next run-of-the-mill shooter with a new setting, but if those shooter profits bring us another Okami, how can we complain?

Other media have the same problem; the same company that made Hotel Rwanda also made Legally Blonde; book publishers do not limit themselves to War and Peace when Harry Potter can finance their entire operation for a decade. I think the sooner we accept the broad nature of gaming the better off we'll be.

Would I like to see more mature games with more socially conscious content? You bet. Do I believe those are the only games worth creating? Nope. Let's try to appreciate the shallowly fun experiences this industry can provide even while we push for deeper, more impactful games.

I agree with the premise of this opinion piece, although I think the title is a bit misleading -- "social responsibility" and "broader appeal" aren't necessarily the same thing.

Setting aside the question of games as instruments of political persuasion, the question of expanding the appeal of games is one that's on my mind most of the time these days, too. Most games today are focused on mechanics. That's understandable; by far the most common understanding of "game" involves action-oriented, competitive rules-based play, so the primacy of mechanics as the focus of design makes some sense.

But as numerous theorists of play have pointed out, action and competitive resource-acquisition aren't the only kinds of activities that people enjoy -- there are also intellectual (puzzle, strategy) and emotional (social, story) forms of play.

I think the intellectual and emotional play experiences are represented by the "dynamics" and "aesthetics" portions of the MDA design model, and give games the virtues of those design concepts. Great dynamics create highly interactive and internally plausible worlds to explore, delivering an intellectually stimulating play experience. Great aesthetics give the player's choices meaning, illuminating emotional resonances within our personal lives.

In short, human beings are capable of enjoying forms of play that involve not just action but intellect and emotion as well. (We can think of these respectively as hands/mind/heart, or mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics, or gamism/simulationism/narrativism, etc.) All of these are valid forms of play. And thus they all are appropriate targets for game design.

Does anyone believe that Deus Ex continues to receive critical praise, and has inspired one sequel and another currently in the works, solely for its mechanics?

Where discussions on this subject of full-spectrum game design often go astray is that someone who personally prefers action-oriented play reads comments like mine and reacts, "Oh noes -- they're trying to make all games artsy with no commercial value!" That's usually followed by a response strongly endorsing mechanics-focused game design (as Joshua McDonald did in the comments above).

The problem is that this reacts to an argument that no one has proposed. What I favor, and what I believe Brandon Sheffield was encouraging, is not that *all* games must from now on be designed to appeal equally to action and intellect and emotion -- it's only that there be *some* games made that hit on all these cylinders. It's perfectly OK -- desirable, even -- to offer some games that focus only on providing great mechanics, so long as we support other developers when they try to make games that aspire to simultaneous greatness of mechanics and dynamics and aesthetics.

Games with great mechanics alone are enough for some people all of the time, and perhaps all people some of the time. They're not enough for all people all of the time.

There are game consumers who want more, who long for games that engage not only their hands but their hearts and minds as well. When all of these elements are present and focused, games, like other creative media forms, will have the expressive power to speak about the human condition. But they'll do so in a way that's unique to games as an interactive entertainment medium. And that uniqueness, beyond its artistic value, gives such games potential commercial value.

Whether the game industry moneylenders can be persuaded of this, and that it's in their best long-term interest to seed the marketplace with such games that exercise more than our fast-twitch muscles, is a problem that will solve itself as soon as there's a full-spectrum game that unexpectedly grabs the attention of the masses and makes a zillion bucks.

Then all we'll have to complain about are the crappy knock-offs. :)