It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously

And to go further, I see games which are already doing this in a positive way.

Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.

This article is kind of all over the place. On the one hand it is making a sort of "All entertainment we experience affects who we are." argument which is so broad as to be meaningless -- change on what level? Watching one episode of Jeopardy doesn't change me in a meaningful way, watching Jeopardy every night for 10 years might.

Then it transitions into "Here's a list of questions to help you appreciate games on a deeper level", which is to me, both wrongheaded and insulting.

It's wrongheaded because who are you to say how people should enjoy games? People are different, unless someone is harming you, let them do what they want to do. Maybe someone spends all day as an academic educating graduate students about the deeper meaning of 19th century literature. At the end of the day maybe they're ready to just load up Team Fortress 2 and blow up some people with cartoony missiles.

To me, telling people "this is how you should enjoy games" is much more condescending than a post saying "these are the games you should enjoy, and these other games are bad." It's moving beyond just matters of taste into telling people how to think and how to behave.

The author seems to believe we should adopt a literacy about games very similar to one used when evaluating literature. I think this is incredibly misguided, because they're entirely different mediums (or at least should be). In Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, he compares video games to word problems, and says video games like word problems should be judged by their cognitive challenges not their literary merit.

If you want to evaluate games seriously by looking through a narrative lens, I don't think video games could ever surpass books in their ability to tell a story. The ability to control an avatar "normally makes a coherent interpretation of the avatar and his / her behavior in regard to the game’s story quite difficult, if not impossible. Players usually don’t enact an ideal story – at least not in the first playthrough. Take James Bond games, for example. While you learn how to be as cool, cunning and competent as James Bond, you normally act like an idiot. Not taking cover when being shot at, forgetting to reload, getting lost, driving against water hydrants and being killed – all of this is far from an ideal realization of the James Bond character (Well Played 1.0 (don't recommend))."

Perhaps the argument could be made that video games give the player agency in the story in a way books don't so can excel narratively where books can't, but first of all how many games with a narrative focus really give the player any meaningful agency? And if I have meaningful agency, I'm writing my own story; I don't need to think deeply about what the author/designer is saying like this article advocates.

This essay isn't short, but I think he makes a lot of good points about the history of the Zelda franchise and argues the next Zelda would be better if it had no story: http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ . Video games can have value and meaning that transcends narrative structures.

I think a lot of people would agree with you on the developers with coding, but would argue that it's more of an issue of money versus art. "In the old days," they'd say, "artists earned basically nothing and did art because they cared about the art," or something like that. It's also a very Western phenomenon to make art closed-code. We think of "canon" StarWars or "canon" literature, but in Japanese literature, it was actually common practice for writers to "add on" to the works they liked the best. That work then became passed on to the next generation. There wasn't this idea of "canonicity."

In the same way, some game developers are moving away from the idea of closed-code gaming--but we're talking indie games here. Minecraft is the best example ever. The download software actually includes folders for you to put in all your mods. And, in the end, that formula makes money. People like being able to add their creativity to your product, so why not let them?

So fear not, my friend, not all developers are as tightfisted as those COD folks. And, even when they do, for the technologically savvy, where there's a will, there's always a way. = )

Hi, ebbv! I do want to point out that those are questions, not answers. No one is telling you how to enjoy games--the fundamental question is, is there a way to enjoy games that accesses the deeper human levels of our existence? No where in this article does it say "DAMN YOU FOR NOT FINDING DEEP MEANING IN TETRIS YOU FOOL." That, I agree with you, would be a little over the top. = P

There's another, bigger question to consider: if video games affect your mind so profoundly, it's probably a good idea to think a little before playing. I don't want to rephrase the article to say "think before buying," because that's an obvious part of anything we do--but if your pre-motor cortex actually replicates and primes your motor cortex to perform the Scout's baseball-bashing of Team Fortress 2, don't you at least want to consciously decide on what level it affects you? If you make the conscious decision to transfer TF2 only to area MT--which is essentially what you're arguing--then that decision should be conscious. Rather than just experiencing, isn't it legitimate to consider what your pre-motor cortex is acting out? Is it unreasonable to ask that we be consciencious about the workings of our minds during games?

This isn't to say that EVERY SINGLE TIME you play a game you should write a paper and submit it to a game magazine. I would rather you didn't do that, because I would like to do that, and you would be competing, and, yannow, capitalism.

This is just to say that it's reasonable to become aware of WHICH areas of your brain are affected--because whether you like it or not, your brain ACTIVELY practices killing. I'm not putting a moral label on that. I personally believe that's a good thing sometimes. I'm saying "Know thyself, brain-flesh-meatbag, and have fun playing."

So have fun. BTW, who's your favorite TF2 character? I am pretty much in love with the Scout.