A raven flits across the small YouTube window open on the right side of my desktop, and it caws. Behind it, in its mini-480p frame, a threatening cumulonimbus cloud shrouds the summit of Mount Olympus.

As the sleek, jet-black bird descends, I look to the left window; I'm drawing up an outline for this very article and perusing my massively short list of massively popular, cheerful games I've come up with so far. It reads thus: Katarmari Damacy, The Beatles: Rock Band, Nintendo games, and my personal favorite, blinking cursor. I'm dead set on drumming up more happy games. But my mind is blank.

In this short interchange between what I was writing and what I was watching, I realized something. Over the past of couple years, mature gaming has come under the microscope of both the gaming press and the wider public. And everyone seems to think that giving sex and violence a noncartoonish, judiciously administered treatment is the answer. This has never sat well with me. I'll tell you why.

You can't codify emotions and aesthetic principles into age-range categories. We constantly associate violence and sexuality with maturity. The reasons for this are readily apparent: Those topics fall within the purview of adult experience. But what about other adult experiences, like job promotions or marriage or child birth?

This led me to the obvious answer: Making games about life's triumphs must be difficult. But why?

Let's jump back to the God of War 3 trailer. In the right window, the avian harbinger of death hops around on a rotting tree stump. And I'm getting upset and distracted because I can't come up with more than three sanguine games (Nintendo doesn't even count because it's a developer, not a game).

Feel-good movies frequently do gangbusters at the box office (just look at the money that a movie like Marley & Me raked in). To be clear, I'm not asking for the sort of unadulterated, schmaltz-fests that films like Marley & Me or prose like Tuesdays with Morrie offer. But with regard to narrative, video games are indistinguishable from movies or books. In games, the cut-scenes and the story have the same basic human-interest thrust.

Here's the problem: Video games posses the unique quality of interface. If Kratos carries out the idea of violence through the on-screen metaphor of killing hundreds of goons, what then is the analogue for cheerfulness in another game? Sentimentality seems impossible. How do you present button tapping as a facsimile of geniality?

The trailer plays. The raven dances down the moribund landscape and eventually settles. I focus back on God of War 3. And as I do, the inky animal shoots its beak right, offscreen, and plucks out the eyeball of an unseen corpse. It dangles.

The answer isn't simple. The easiest response is to make games that appeal to both children and adults...but this isn't any kind of solution. Nintendo's been doing it for years, and by including children, we relegate the possibilities of emotive expression to the realm of youthful consumption.

What we need to do is reorient the presupposed goals of gaming. Victory is generally the end point of playing games, but in recent years, it seems that "gaming" and "playing games" have become distinct. We locked and limited the very term "gaming" when we attributed it the same qualities as poker, Monopoly, or coin tossing. And we did the same with its very name: Gaming.

Moving the medium forward is going to be a process of deconstructing this notion. Movies and books aren't about winning. When is the last time you "won" a song? In the media, violent acts and male-gendered sexual viewpoints are all about purposed domination. To distill it, it's all about victory -- the same kind of winning that happens in a foot race.

This is why making a cheerful game is so, so hard. Carving out a meaningful swath of the gaming public and making a profitable game that describes a noncompetitive experience isn't going to take just innovation -- Heavy Rain is here to fill that gap. It's going to take the sort of gumption to create something that defies the precepts of what gaming is yet appeals to what people understand as a video game.

The God of War 3 trailer is coming to a full stop: The music swells, and an ashen man scuttles the bird. It's Kratos. And as he nimbly jumps through the forest, he utters some disturbing -- and engaging -- words: "Death is in my blood!"

I'm totally stoked to play God of War 3, but as soon as the YouTube video finishes, it upsets me. I've fallen for the trap again. My ideas for this article have reached summation, but I can't, for the life of me, think of any more titles to add to my tiny list of mega-successful, cheerful games. I'm forlorn and waiting for a title that bridges the divide between mature themes and happy events. To me, that would be an adult game.