Video game growing pains on both sides of the coin.

Games these days are full of controversy. I’m not talking about the wanton violence or rated R dialogue, that’s yesterday’s news. I’m talking about the growing pains of an industry going through its adolescence in an effort to come of age. The industry doesn’t really know how it’s going to do it, but it certainly knows why it wants to:

“Because I wanna be taken seriously damnit! Ughhh nobody respects me!”

~Video Games

Of course this isn’t completely true, but it’s how we’d all expect a teenager to act going through that all-to-painful “transition period”. It’s our duty to speak in hyperbole with an abundance of melodrama.

The problem is, or perhaps therein lies the solution, that there’s a lot of debate going on about how this is all going to happen. One side of the coin says: “Just keep doing what we’re doing, we’ve always taken it seriously and if we stay the course the rest of the world will catch up.” The other side says “We’re not going to be taken seriously if we don’t push things further, elevate our craft to a “high art” that adds something more than just “fun” to the myriad artistic endeavors out there.”

Most recently, Shawn Elliot was called out for being on the latter side of the coin. Pushing games journalism under a critical lens, attempting to uncover some of the problems within his trade by putting out a call to action through an online symposium. To most of us on neither side of the coin [most coin metaphors would like you to believe that you can only be on one side as that makes up most of its surface area, but many of us don't believe in these coin metaphors and remain in the middle somewhere] this all seemed well and good, like a fellow trying to improve things for the greater good.

But not everyone agrees. Some on the opposite side of the coin, let’s call them the “old sk00lers”, vehemently disagree to the point of making a forum thread on the subject stirring up the “new sk00lers” into a tizzy.

As a developer this was all very entertaining to me. Seeing just about every games journalist I follow come together on this forum thread berating the opposition with BBQs and LOLlerskates. I got a chuckle out of the whole thing, but then today I was thinking… “Is this what journalists think of our debates with all this business of ‘being taken seriously’? Are they secretly laughing in the windows?”

I’ve been involved in many heated discussions, both online and offline, about the terrible question of “are games art?” Which is simply another way to say “Why don’t they take us seriously!?” And it seems as though that that some high-falutin’ journalists are recognizing the art-game side of things, but really with mainstream Esquire it ends up not being about the games themselves, but about the romance surrounding them. Something I’m guessing Jason doesn’t give a shit about.

I don’t think either side is wrong, it’s all necessary for the growth of the industry and in the end, all of this pain is going to good use. One day we will grow up, get laid, and stop worrying so much about the rest of the high school and start focusing on what’s really important. The games.