Gamers Clearly DON’T Want Gaming To Be Art

Oh look, the gaming community is still full of idiots. This is why I’m so glad to be a Gaymer, because I can just retreat to my little niche where all the sane people belong.

On the topic of Gayming, I recently picked up and played Gone Home. Whilst it’s a ridiculously overpriced game and thus I’m very glad I bought it in a sale, I really enjoyed it. It’s basically a point and click adventure game told through a first-person perspective – which is something I want to see more of. There are already games like Amnesia and Outlast, but their mostly linear horror stories, and Outlast gets real generic real fast.

Gone Home is not a horror story, despite the game taking place in the largest bloody house in the world with an obnoxious lighting sound effect that actually made me turn part of the sound off. What it is is a surprisingly seamless interactive story where through reading clues you discover the story as you go on. Whilst there are aspects of linearity, it’s possible for you to listen to Sam’s journals out of order, and doing so won’t necessarily confuse the story.

It’s not a perfect experience. I’m not going to do a ‘Best Games of 2014’ list at the end of the year, but if I did then Gone Home wouldn’t be on it. But it deserves its place in gaming as an example of the art form continuing to push itself. So I was surprised to find that the majority of Steam-users hated this game – dismissing it because you could barely interact with anything, and frustrated by the lack of choice. All these comments reminded me of this hilarious video about The Stanley Parable, and yes, the video is based on an actual review.

So, just like Depression Quest, we have another game that pushes how an interactive story can be told…and yet again the gaming community has proceeded to reject it en-masse.

Couple this with the fact that Antichamber – one of the most original games I’ve ever played – has thus far sold poorly, Proteus – another original game – has been rejected, and everyone is complaining that feminism has ruined gaming. Look at all this from a distance, and you’ll realise that clearly the gaming community doesn’t want gaming to be an art.

Any attempt to dissect and challenge gaming has been rebuked. Attempts to make us question precisely what a game is, and attempts to apply the same critical thought that’s applied to any and every other artform has been shunned. The gaming community clearly does not define ‘art’ as an entity worth scrutinising – it defines ‘art’ as acceptance. It thinks that if the world defines gaming as art, then gaming is socially acceptable.

Of course, it already is. The fact that there are adverts everywhere for Far Cry 4 means that gaming has now reached the same ubiquity as film, television, and literature. Gaming is no longer an entity pushed to the edge of society. It’s very much part of society.

The gaming community is so obsessed with painting themselves as maligned and ostracised by the public that they’ve forgotten that this image no longer exists. Gaming is a socially acceptable recreational activity, and there is no longer a stigma surrounding gaming. Violent gaming is no longer a hot debate, and Grand Theft Auto 5 was released to considerably less controversy than Grand Theft Auto 4…mostly because it’s just the same game.

Gamers just want the whole world to kneel before video games, worshipping them as this holy entity that is without flaw, and smiting those who subject it to critical discourse or re-invent it. That’s not art – that’s invasion. Stop it.