Last week, you may recall my suggestion that as games press and game fans, we have an ongoing responsibility to consider games in the context of real-world issues, when appropriate, and I urged everyone to consider gaming in a less insular way.
One of the things I found interesting were the number of comments and email responses I received from people who interpreted my rallying cry as a call for more "serious" games, or more didactic games about world issues.
While I wholeheartedly support those efforts - games have enormous potential, obviously, to be used as teaching tools, as metaphors for world issues, and even as healthcare aids, that was not what I meant in this case - every aspect of my discussion is intended to be applied to games as entertainment, and the range of titles we play exactly as they are right now.
Games don't need to change as much as we do.
Most of game fandom, as well as the professional writing about games, largely looks at each title as a disparate product, as a single "walled garden" experience, depriving it of any relevance that exists beyond the moment we switch off the console and get up off the living room floor. Pick five articles about games from off the Web right now - how many of them would make a lick of sense to anyone who wasn't a gamer?
It's not that we can't have a trade press - after all, we write the articles that deal with the topics most gamers are interested in, and there will always be people deeply interested in certain aspects of games alongside people who aren't and will never be.
But our reasons for loving games really don't have much to do with their framerates, or whether a sequel is coming, or even where the idea for the storyline came from, as fascinating as that information often turns out to be. They're intangible - like the friend I discussed in last week's article who played CoD4 through an emotionally difficult weekend without knowing why.
Yeah, I did express regret that CoD4 didn't deal with its setting in less vaguery. But games often decline to be explicitly referential, I think, because of the mentality that gamers just don't want to think about that.
So my proposition is threefold, actually, and each element has nothing to do with changing gamesthemselves.
First, to allow ourselves to truly solidify that portion of the way we relate to games that ties into reality. Games can be escapism, yes, but the places we escape to always have something to say about the things we're escaping from. What is it for you?
Second, to develop a vocal interest in those parallels. For example, in the comments of my original post, many people discussed how their online game became a source of comfort, social support and even key information and news just after 9-11. That's incredibly fucking poignant - why didn't we shout it to the winds back then?
Third, and maybe most important - we must not shut ourselves in. Periodic escapes from our own harsh realities are necessary, but lowering an iron curtain between ourselves and the events across humanity will cripple our relevance. I tried to show the relationship between real-world circumstances and the launch of GTA IV in a recent article, for example, and I am trying to continue developing my imagination to do more work like this. Whether it's that Portal made you think about feminism, or BioShock made you think about society's weird relationship with little girl imagery, or CoD4 made you think about Iraq, don't close that door.
Sometimes, fantasy is an essential salve. Isolation can be necessary. But to the exclusion of all else, it'll starve us into the domain of meaninglessness to anyone but ourselves. And since games sometimes really do mean something, that'd be a shame.
