I've written on here lots of times about the excellent Water Cooler Games a 'serious game' blog, edited by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two counter-culture heroes operating in their own niche between academia and videogame design (see their development studios, Powerful Robot and Persuasive Games). Anyway, Ian has just written a piece for the newly re-launched Edge Online, all about the evolving perception of videogames as a communication medium:
A voice can whisper an amorous sentiment or mount a political stump speech. A book can carry us off to a fantasy world or help us decide where to eat dinner. A film can shock us with a factual account of a genocide or help us practice aerobics.
It is time to take the same attitude when it comes to videogames. We must no longer be satisfied to understand and support games as leisure or productivity or nothing. We must do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.
The title of the feature is 'The End of Gamers', which insinuates that soon, gaming will escape its cultural ghetto to become just another widely accepted media. However, Ian writes on Water Cooler, that the title was provided by the website and is slightly misleading.
Whatever the case, it's an interesting and lucid introduction to Bogost's theories about how videogames are becoming a part of the orthodox media/entertainment/lifestyle landscape - although many are slow to acknowledge it. It's also a sort of introduction to his wider arguments concerning the ways in which games can influence players through a new form of 'procedural rhetoric'. I heartily recommend checking out his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, which I'm still intending to review properly on this site (months late).
