Recently, to go along with its annual awards, Steam (a platform for buying computer games) released this list of their most played games of 2017. While perusing said list, I came to a somewhat depressing realization: all nine of the games with more than 100,000 peak simultaneous players consisted, at their core, of walking around a 3-dimensional environment and shooting people to death. To some this may fit completely with their view of video games as mindless entertainment which promotes violence. But to me it was jarring, possibly because not one of the twenty games in my Steam library adheres to this formula. In my experience video games can be a fascinating artistic medium, but it is difficult to find the gems in the teeming horde of first-person shooters. The overwhelming popularity of this specific genre has distorted the general public's perception of video games, obscuring the fact that, just like other media such as books or movies, they can be used both to offer an easy, numbing distraction and to create a compelling artistic vision.
If you need examples of how video games can be true art, they certainly do exist. Fallen London has some of the best prose I've ever read, while Sunless Skies and Hollow Knight create powerful atmospheres in a way impossible in any other medium. Portal has one of the most memorable villains in any media, and Undertale is basically this blog post in the form of a video game. There are also plenty of games which have tremendous ability to teach. Kerbal Space Program has given me an intuitive understanding of rocket design and orbital mechanics, and Europa Universalis IV greatly expanded my knowledge of history and geography (side note: my ability to pass Mr. Wong's map tests last year with almost no studying was entirely due to this game). With the existence of games like these in mind, its sad to see that most people would rather just blow things up. I can only hope that as video games mature as a medium, this situation will improve.
If you need examples of how video games can be true art, they certainly do exist. Fallen London has some of the best prose I've ever read, while Sunless Skies and Hollow Knight create powerful atmospheres in a way impossible in any other medium. Portal has one of the most memorable villains in any media, and Undertale is basically this blog post in the form of a video game. There are also plenty of games which have tremendous ability to teach. Kerbal Space Program has given me an intuitive understanding of rocket design and orbital mechanics, and Europa Universalis IV greatly expanded my knowledge of history and geography (side note: my ability to pass Mr. Wong's map tests last year with almost no studying was entirely due to this game). With the existence of games like these in mind, its sad to see that most people would rather just blow things up. I can only hope that as video games mature as a medium, this situation will improve.
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