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Another suspicion: "When you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach to video gaming among youth, especially boys in the scouts. If they're going to play, might as well make our organization both more relevant while steering the kids.
To extend the idea to a ridiculous extreme, it's partly like assigning a daily recommended value for marijuana!"
1) Invite them to your excitement and enjoyment by setting an example, enjoying while you play. You may know how weird it is to watch people on TV shows or commercials play games, because they seem *too* exuberant. But why? Maybe it's because of a habit of internally *feeling* excitement without actually letting it all out? It's possible, consider taping yourself while you play your favorite games, even classics from your youth, and see how excited you look.
It's likely that Alex's daughter prefers to watch her dad play because he is encouraged to be so active (with Wii Music), that there's so many invitations to really go over the top to entertain the child. Alex might even get an even better response from really getting into Smooth Moves (which I think of as the Shrek or the better Pixar films of games, something for everyone).
2) Encourage children when they do what you want them to do (whether or not you punish them for the converse is outside the scope of this topic, and I don't want to entertain the notion of parents punishing children for not playing video games (unless maybe as some kind of reverse psychology thing, but still twisted)). It's mean to liken this process to animal training, but humans are animals, so get over it. You might feel dirty if you consider it manipulation, but I get the feeling you'll only want that ability once it's no longer appropriate: when your children get to a rebellious age.
Anyway, don't wait for your child to play a game and try to think and feel through the experience on their own, and you don't have to wait for your child to play a game "right" or earn a score or whatever before you celebrate them. Focus, at least at first, on the simple participation in the activity, having hands on controllers, that sort of thing. You might even try to "patronize" them asking them how they did some thing in a game so they can explain it to you (personally I'd rather be patronized than quizzed), but you might even be fortunate enough to witness your child actually do something you haven't done yourself or known was possible; regardless whenever you get the chance you need to reinforce their interest in the activity by actually expressing interest in your child while they do the activity. Don't worry, you only need to keep it up until you see them taking initiative or palling together with other (hopefully good) kids who are also into video games.
Even if in reality children are too young to appreciate anything about gaming, even with research suggesting that the growth of neural connections is most rapid in those earliest years and probably most conducive to learning, then at least you've practiced what to do when your kid *is* ready, or even better, when your kid *is* ready, even if you don't know it, they'll already be picking up the right cues from you!
(Side note: if you feel your kids are getting frustrated by a game thing, remember that a little goes a long way; nudge them/clue them into one or more solutions and see where they go from there; probably not a very good idea to encourage frustration, unless you know what you're doing regarding the teaching of persistence or something).
3) Finally, as a more advanced process, combine 1 and 2 and focus on "teaching", "mentoring" your child. Possibly the most vital thing to teach when it comes to approaching games is a sense of fantasy, a sense of reality too, and an appreciation for the freedom to experiment in games that is not the case in real life. Even more than accomplishing a goal, it's the sense of curiosity to find out what something does in a game, or anything else for that matter.
In this regard, consider peripheral activities that have some conceptual relation to gaming: navigating kid-friendly websites, Legos/Duplos, arts and crafts, taking things apart and putting them back together (kid-safe materials please). Even reading to your kids (or better, making up stories for your kids, or at least openly exploring other things their favorite characters could be doing), coupled with having them tell you stories, real or fiction doesn't matter, then asking questions to consider the possibilities, these all have familiar aspects to gaming, and gaming also reflects back on them.
Most of all, don't be freaked out if you think of raising your kids like figuring out a video game. Just remember to focus more on the discovery and constantly rethinking strategies and tactics instead of merely the flag at the end of each level, or the points you earn. If you do it right, your kids might end up thinking about you in the same fun but challenging way. Nothing wrong approaching the philosophy of life as a video game, so long as there's a healthy dose of practical reality."
My only comfort: the hope of only attractive, legal, nubiles being the only ones to play together or be publicly documented, all else relegated to a modern taboo--"First rule of Kinect: You don't talk about Kinect. Second rule of Kinect: If you're cute and legal, yeah, go ahead and talk about Kinect".
I don't blame my "sensitization" to attractive girls and the "desensitization" to violence on video games, but I think I could welcome a world that can be desensitized to attractiveness and sensitized to violence instead, and I still think video games, like any media, has the potential to accomplish just that.
For now though, the only tub I will tolerate seeing is my own, and only on good days!"
I'd put it this way, as a hypothetical system: bring game designers together with other artists as well as psychologists and neuroscientists as a primary team for developing general methods and techniques to train minds (you might say indoctrinate, I'm not moralizing here). The psychologists and neuroscientists can check the effectiveness of proposed general principles. Let's call this group the glass group, for purpose of analogy.
Then bring in your scholars and academics or anyone else with a body of facts, techniques, and frameworks/philosophies to teach to come up with the checklist of things they need students to learn as well as a list of ways to demonstrate that students learned each item sufficiently.Let's call this group the water group.
Now, while the two groups can prepare separately, eventually they need to come together to forge a properly integrated product. For one, the glass group sets about designing some variations on general-purpose vessels and doodads to make the vessels deliver their contents, but they need to be sure not to try to fill those vessels with information outside of their immediate expertise.
Second, the water group has through tradition and peer review determined what is important for them to pass on and discuss with newer generations, but given the current torrent of new opinions, theories, and facts, the sheer breadth and depth of what humanity thinks it knows, the water group may need to "outsource" its teaching methodology and tool design to the glass group which seems to specialize in that design.
However, the water group does need to communicate with the glass group on specific projects and bodies of teachable content to provide the most appropriate method to deliver specific content, while the glass gropu needs to have an idea of what kind of content is considered important so it can have some direction in its effort to develop a body of principles. Even at the simplest interaction, the scholars and academics can discuss the methods they used to learn what they have learned, and the game designers and artists can develop ways to embed those techniques into "entertaining" game mechanics, while the scientists find ways to confirm or even enhance those methods, and maybe all three can even develop new effective techniques together.
Along the way you can have other people chiming in, like marketers and politicians, executives and school administrators, modulating the media/delivery method or the content/material, but let's keep this model simple.
In this day and age of broad and deep knowledge from the arts and humanities to science and engineering, even sport and war, education is as much a specialized field of study and expertise as 20th century American history or differential calculus. And while it makes some sense that people who have learned the material should theoretically be capable of teaching their methods to learn the material, this does not exclude the possibility of "making the process better" by bringing in a more dedicated general approach to the development of educational techniques and tools.
Finally, let's not limit ourselves to thinking of games as entertainment. Heck, I hear in ancient Greece and even in some circles today, philosophical discussion, scholarly debate, and even research and peer review are all closer to recreation than work (with pay and prestige merely being practical bonuses). Games like anything human beings in the "normal" range between rational and insane are capable of being used for recreation or useful work. But, it's the responsibility of producers, consumers, and those at the periphery to ensure that games are applied in the ways that benefits them best, whether that is purely for "entertainment", or "education", or "employment", or whatever.
By the way, if you're more of a believer in the selfishness and subjectivity of human nature, then you can take the same groups I laid out above and imagine them arguing how their areas of expertise fit into education, and hopefully through some kind of check/balance or other governance something that works "good enough" plops out.
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Shoot, I forgot to mention: a bit of a can of worms opened up by bringing up Central America, or any real-world historical time and place in an industry naturally assumed to emphasize entertainment over scholarship. It's one thing to go "Carmen Sandiego" or even "Caesar III" to aspire to academic accuracy in the info files (despite lacking citation, etc., at least they had senses of "factness" to them that were kept separate from their gameplay), but weaving in historical events with fictional ones makes for a dicey education.
I think I've heard of a term "gumping" which might fit: as in Forrest Gump, weaving fiction into real documented events; while the movie has some appeal for highlighting a scant few events in American post-WWII experience, it must only be used as a secondary tool to a proper text or documentary for setting the facts straight. On the other hand, if teachers, academics, scholars, etc. could figure out how to weave media savvy with content without students mixing up the two, then there might be something useful there for education.
(Please ignore my comment box below; forgot I could edit these comments now; merged it into this box).
For one, I argue that anyone who claims to speak cogently about High Art is usually only intelligible to other uppity-ups in that same medium's High Art, and anyone who thinks they understand what those uppity ups are saying are either uppity-ups themselves or wannabe-followers. Not that both are necessarily bad, just that what they understand and say should only really be relevant to their own communities and the context they understand.
Likewise, I suggest pursuing something akin to a video-game community version of a revolution in thought. Simply put, we define when what we've got is "our" medium's High Art, and leave it to "outsiders" to try and figure out what it all means.
Or not even worry about the High Art issue at all. Isn't High Art kind of an intellectual snobbery thing? Can't we be satisfied with merely demonstrating the basic artistic power of video games, of any interactive medium, to communicate abstract ideas from one mind or group of minds to another? A power that is basically inherent in the purpose of all media and even genre?
If people want to talk about the High Art of video games, let them. Sometimes even I don't feel like trying to high-falutin' intellectualize with someone really getting abstract about a game I actually like. But sometimes I do. And even if I were to end up going off the deep end High Arting video game this and that, that doesn't mean I'd be right trying to evaluate another medium for its High Art value, or that I'd even make sense to try.
Although if pressed, I'd say that critical techniques from non-video-game media are still applicable to video games wherever video games borrow heavily from the appropriate medium. Video games attempt cinematic techniques, orchestra and choreography, even line and color, shade and hue of paint and composition, sculpture. These are probably easily demonstrated and where visible can be attacked with the critical tools established for those media.
And yet there'd still be that new stuff that interactivity brings, that complicating factor that is audience participation, or even lack thereof as digital agents operate bits and pieces of games for us despite player input, or if procedural generation and AI-related content creation comes about, even developer input. This is probably where it gets the most exciting, trying to figure out not just how all the older media borrowing and integration can be interpreted and critiqued, but in figuring out what the new stuff that machine interactivity brings to the table.
Here I say that video game High Art comes from the developer-designer's mastery of the conceptual space to shape the range of possible ways the player can interact, to essentially show what it means to set the boundaries of a complex abstraction in exacting detail so that despite the audience's illusion of freedom, there's always this boundary that cannot be broken without changing the content or ultimately the code.
But it's also a negotiation between the player and designer, a qualitatively advanced form of collaboration between artist and audience, and so much as High Art is about snobbery and separating the intellectual elite from the masses, video games can only really do that as a function of how they're built at the border between gamer-friendly and not, maybe somewhere where casual gamer as understood today blurs into "harder" gamers and their respective games.
Then there's also the argument that High Art cannot be commercial, is anti-commercial, is all about the pure expression of the artist (as in a singular auteur to borrow a term), with no taint from the audience. Well, there's nothing stopping this pursuit of High Art in video games except the technical hurdles of learning the digital language of the medium and the limits of what it can do.
Or perhaps it's the argument that High Art is about saying to everyone else: we're pioneers at the edges of the possible uses, the limits of control of our medium. In that case, I suppose I could concede that as computers constantly get faster, potentially outrunning our capability to truly tap out its creative potential, then there's no way to claim that same definition of High Art for video games without enabling computers to be the conduits, the creators of this version of High Art, as they would be poised to process fast enough to keep up with the development of the technology that interactive digital media is built on.
And that's just scratching the surface. Point is, while there's no need to burn bridges, we don't need to take what outsiders say about video games as art as the end-all word. They're input, like Frank's position: one voice among many. What's important is what we as "insiders" say about video games as art, whether or not we even care how high an art it is.
Personally, at the end of the day, all I care about is being entertained for the day-to-day, having my thoughts expanded now and then by something mindblowing, and on the rare occasion, be witness to truly pushing the boundaries of what video games can communicate as well as the limits of what video games can process and show.
Finally, I think there's a much better question to ask than "are video games high art?" or even "are video games art?":
Have video games shown that they can communicate ideas that cannot be communicated in other media? If they have, then already the medium has suggested its necessity. If what it uniquely communicates is judged valuable, then it has also proven its unique value.
Going a step further: have video game communicated ideas "better" than how the same ideas are communicated in other media? This is a thornier issue, since it starts to bring up comparison and implies a threat to obsoleting other media. Perhaps not now, but sometime in the future it's conceivable that the conceptual space taken up by video games as a medium and its range of expressive power actually threatens cinema, documentary, novels, poetry, orchestral music, dance choreography, whatever have you, but for now, it's a possible observation that proponents of traditional/older media may feel their pet medium threatened to change or become obsolete, and the only thing they can do is rail against "progress".
On that latter part, I rather hope not. I don't like seeing anything obsoleted if at some point it ever worked and worked well. More likely interactivity and game-like design will transform older media, absorbing them into its maws as it integrates them together into interactive multimedia complexes.
In the end, it probably all boils down to paradigms, world views, and assumptions and beliefs about what is possible given what you know and understand, and conversely, how you understand what you think you know is possible. Games and interactive media and the speed of data flux that computers enable really stretch the imagination, such that I vainly think that for the first time in human history since humans were held in the grip of superstition and total bewilderment at the mysteries of their immediate universe, we just might be at or close to a similar rediscovery within the virtual world. The difference with gamers is that they simply assume that anything is possible in the world of a game, or they think nothing of the surreal limitations imposed on them through design or technical specs. With anyone unfamiliar with interactive media, or worse, couched in the comfort of long-established knowledge of traditional media, there's an idea that "all bets are off" and vertigo sets in whenever UI confusion doesn't get in the way.
Um, so I guess that last part boils down to: "Ebert's just being an old geezer who is afraid of what he really doesn't understand and may even feel threatens or goes against most of what he knows about what he knows best.""
A little disappointed Braid never showed up at all too, but it's not exactly an approachable game nor a long-time classic, despite Portal persisting in #5. Then again, Portal had Valve lineage, great 3D graphics, silly-psycho AI, and fake cake."
Anyway, there's probably a lot to be said for appreciating either intuitively or consciously just how contested the #1 spot would be and placing your vote strategically knowing that. I would have guessed that the Nashlike equilibrium spot would be #5, being the safest bet to avoid being knocked off (and Portal did hang the whole time too), but I underestimated the power of #1 spot to keep players distracted, but I think there's also a lot to be said about placing a title that could be hard to move if it's as solid a pick as Super Mario 64.
If I knew how to make bets, I probably would have given longest odds on the #1 spot caller, with a high dropoff of risk going down to #2, then a gradual decrease to safest odds on #10. But I still would not have figured #2 to last so long."
1. Chess (switched)
2. Super Mario 64
3. Deus Ex
4. Metal Gear Solid
5. Portal
6. Shadow of the Colossus
7. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
8. Chrono Trigger
9. Super Metroid
10. Baldur's Gate 2"
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Given your topic and background, I am curious about your experience playing independent games, games that aspire against the mainstream, games that attempt to innovate game mechanics and game presentation, "artistic"/"art" games, etc. I suspect that given your awareness of the "man behind the curtain" you would be better engaged playing "arthouse" titles over mainstream profit-motivated (but still delicious) product.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife
A common complaint of people who take courses like Media or Film studies is that they never look at a TV program, advertisement or film the same way ever again. Analyzing a medium in depth and pulling it apart by the seams teaches you to watch things critically — analyzing every aspect and codifying them inside your mind. Most tropers, academics, directors or writers who do this start to find new ways to enjoy media. The subtle blends of plots, the new spins on old stories. The rare and welcome times where a plot you weren't expecting appears. But it is never the same.
Enjoyment comes from a balance of Recognition and Surprise — we enjoy things that we can relate to and have seen before, but we also like to be surprised. Total recognition is cliché; total surprise is alienating. Through comparing different works of fiction, browsing TV Tropes will merge surprise almost entirely with recognition and you will begin analyzing everything and taking a totally new (and possibly better) enjoyment from media - or reality."