It’s important to remember that good game design is really difficult and it is and art in itself. But the question is whether that’s all they’re capable of.

You can look at the truly great games, like Chess, Go, Pinochle, Tetris, and Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course, and nobody will deny that they’re masterfully designed. But what does the audience get out of playing them?

Game design is kind of like architecture in that respect — you can look at a great building like the Notre Dame, and immediately know that it’s a stunning creation and a great work of art. But it doesn’t say anything other than “I like God” and it doesn’t really do anything to the viewer except be nice to look at and keep him out of the rain.

It’s not just narrative; it’s the idea that the game means something or says something other than just being a diversion. And that’s not saying that Super Monkey Ball would be better if it made an existential statement on how humanity was really nothing more than monkeys trapped in our own plastic balls of self-delusion and futility. There’s nothing wrong with just being fun.

All’s I’m saying is that games are capable of being more than just diversions, and more games should take advantage of that potential. There are plenty of books that are about nothing more than plot, but then there are books that take a plot about a man going fishing or a different man searching for a whale and use that to say something larger.

Games don’t have to do that, too, but they can, and they already have shown the potential to do so. That’s where Ebert’s wrong.

Why are video games always compared to literature and film and not, say, to … games.

Like Chess, Go, Pinochle, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, etc.

We never hear anyone ask, “Why aren’t video games more like Hungry Hungry Hippo?” It’s always, “Why aren’t games more like Citizen Kane?”

It seems to me that academics are spending a lot of time talking about narrative in games and other fancy talk, but Tetris and Super Monkey Ball are both games and they have fuck all to do with narrative.

I don’t know, my argument here isn’t well thought out, but it is something that bothers me when I don’t self-medicate.