It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously

I personally feel this may be taking the "games as art" discussion a bit too far. Yes, some games are art, and almost all games have artistic value. But when I'm playing Quake, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is that it's fun and it's challenging and I'm playing with my friends. Just like when I'm watching the latest summer blockbuster, I don't care that it won't win an Oscar, or that the girl in the plot is really just there to stand around and look pretty, or that the hero is somehow surviving things that no human could withstand. It's fun.

I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.

Yeah. I wish but this isn't going to happen.

Its time developers took gaming less seriously. When I was growing up every game had codes and one of the best parts of the nes/snes/sega era was game genie. I didn't even want a system without the game genie. Nowadays, developers don't want you bashing through their games. Some games like COD's will let you put in codes only after beating the campaign mode. Because every gamer is like, oh wow I beat that now let me do it with codes on...' The other thing I have found is like in Red Dead Redemption where you can use codes, but you cant save the game if you use them.

I spend a crap load on games. Its come to the point now where I will check if a game has cheat codes before I purchase it. IMHO Assassin Creed 3, Far Cry 3, both super shitty games. And on top of being super shitty games the developers are wont let you control the world and insist you play the game the way it was intended.

Developers taking games too serious is ruining video games. Its not suppose to be serious its a video game, at least thats what my friends tell me after I cuss them out for beating me in Fifa...

The reason that developers are removing cheat codes is so that they can sell them to you via downloadable content or in-app purchase (such as nearly every EA game made in the last couple years).

That's why game modding has been popular (and made super-easy due to Steam Workshop), but that's PC only.

I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of artistic expression.

You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman)

I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.