Zen Pinball (2, which is basically just an engine upgrade over 1) is really rather good.

 I really enjoy the Thor table on Pinball FX 2 and Street Fighter II is great as well. The Rocky & Bullwinkle one is beautiful looking but really difficult to play on.

My mom sold our Apple IIe+ and 500 floppies full of games at a garage sale when I was off at university … I don’t care if I was 24 at the time and it was ancient. That damn thing was a part of me – how could she not have known that?

Wow, that was worthy of an article on its own. Actually, seriously, you might want to consider expanding on those ideas in some sort of special feature, because they’re pretty awesome.

@Enkidum:disqus Thanks! Maybe I’ll do that.

 Also, wouldn’t it be great if somebody took back up the old Cervantes-era criticisms that novels were total-brain rot? Or, hell, go back to the Phaedrus and write-off writing altogether! Those seem to be threads of media-enmity that have totally atrophied. Some perverse part of me wants to design the first pointedly anti-literacy video game.

@Jackbert322:disqus I’d argue against the idea that some games aren’t important and should not be taken seriously. That’s not to say that a lot of games aren’t produced with the intent of being simply enjoyed but not thought about, but once they’ve been made, they’re in the same pool as the “issue/art” games that do intend for their players to take them in with serious consideration. 

One thing that has always irked me about academia is the attempt to divide art into High Art or “serious” art, and Low Art or “not serious” art. This sometimes leads to very strange (and, in my opinion, dangerously arbitrary) divisions. Roy Lichtenstein creates Pop Art (the visual arts movement, not another form of art) reproductions of single panels of old romance comics. Lichtenstein’s reproductions are considered High Art, while the romance comics, which contain the exact images Lichtenstein reproduced, just smaller and in context, are considered Low Art. One gets studied in class, one gets studied on the student’s own time without professorial oversight.

The dangerously arbitrary bit I mentioned earlier comes from the fact these divisions ascribe a worth to different forms of art. The great painters of the Renaissance (high art), who in many ways fail to influence or reflect the problems in our daily lives, are worth more time and effort to study than a contemporary television show (low art). And we tend to protect the things that are most valuable. But the truth of the matter is that we don’t know what will be most influential in art to later generations. Some stuff that might have been quite valuable simply hasn’t survived because it wasn’t considered worth it. Some stuff that is quite valuable survived by the skin of its teeth. Shakespeare was eclipsed in popularity in his day by bear-baiting, and nearly went bankrupt a number of times. Luckily, thanks to lack of copyright, his works persisted after his death and were preserved, and now he’s at the forefront of English literary tradition. Melville’s most popular work in his lifetime was not Moby-Dick, which met with scathing reviews (it was considered to be poorly written, of all things) and sold terribly. It took over a 100 years of reputation rehabilitation until it became part of the American canon. 

Now, I’d be hard pressed to imagine a world in which Mr. Belvedere makes his triumphant arrival on the world cultural stage, neither would I desire to live there, but I’m not particularly challenged by the idea that Pinball might very well do so at some future point. Or The Sims, perhaps (or better yet, Dwarf Fortress). 

It might seem pretentious to ascribe equal footing to Shakespeare and Tarn Adams (creator of Dwarf Fortress), and it almost certainly is, right here and now. But not having the benefit of being in the future looking past, I’d rather be pretentious about a medium here and now and have it only be a passing fad than have it dismissed and forgotten when it might have had value.

In closing, play Dwarf Fortress, it’ll change your life.

I think this all will change, frankly, as people grow up who are used to engaging with games on an intellectual or emotional basis, and know that their worth is something more than “Point gun at man to kill man and to make self winner.”  I think there are already signs that this is starting to happen.  This site, with its focus on the thematic and artistic elements of gaming, rather than pure gameplay mechanics, is a good example of that.  As a small example, I also ran across a blog post in the NY Review of Books of all places by a former classmate, arguing for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games as an excellent companion piece to the Tarkovsky film.  Eventually, these kinds of arguments will reach critical mass, I hope, enough so that one won’t be able to just dismiss out of hand the notion that games are art.

To take the TV parallel, maybe we also need the game equivalent of The Sopranos or Mad Men, a game where someone can point and say “There!  That is art!”  Do we really have an agreed-on game like that right now?  

Also, frankly, the people making and playing games need to think they’re “worthy” too.  Commenters need to stop criticizing writers for being “pretentious lol”, and the gamemakers themselves can’t just say “This is just a videogame.”

@facebook-501651:disqus I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to treat games as occupying a different cultural space from the “passive” media (movies, TV, music, and here I use passive very loosely to mean you don’t have to do anything to make them advance). Historically, those two have mixed very poorly, and neither has been well-served by tackling the other, with the possible exception of Wreck-It Ralph. 
As a rule of thumb, the most successful art games are the ones that discard passive media tropes, though there are exceptions.Also, it’s not like there isn’t tons of crossover between Gameological and the AVC. 

@facebook-501651:disqus The reason Gameological is its own site is because I wanted to do things editorially that wouldn’t fit into the A.V. Club rubric. I was going to start the site on its own, but when I told my Onion colleagues about it, they thought it would dovetail nicely with AVC, and we agreed to work together, which was so exciting for me. If that partnership hadn’t happened, the AVC games section would have been wound down when I left. Instead, we have had a flourishing of games discussion on a site that extends the A.V. Club approach in other directions.

So it burns me when you characterize my formation of Gameological as somehow “splitting off” games from the critical conversation. I think it’s self-evident by now that when things live on different dot-coms, that does not prevent ideas from cross-pollinating. That’s the premise not only of the web, but of the broader cultural conversation. You write as if all the discussion needs to happen explicitly under the auspices of one united avclub.com monolith in order to be considered valid. My response is that the ideas are far more important than the institution, and at Gameological we happen to be interested in exploring the ideas that emerge from games and play. Those explorations can (and do) respond to and inform all the other discussion on the web, regardless of whether there is an A.V. Club banner or a Gameological banner at the top.

You keep talking about games as an “audio/visual medium,” but like I said above, this “medium” concept is not an especially important one for me. I think of games more as a concept and a cultural force than as something so rigid as a “medium,” and likewise Gameological is built not around a medium but around that idea of “game”—maybe that’s an irrelevant distinction to you, but not to me.

As for this: “We need a place that connects the dots between all these forms of entertainment and media (oddly enough AVC was that place until TGS was created) and we need our critics to be more receptive to accepting that multi-media cultural conversations are worthy of having.” First of all, the notion that AVC was somehow diminished rather than enriched by the creation of Gameological is silly. Second of all, the implication that Gameological is NOT a place that’s receptive to and conducive to the kind of conversations you’re talking about is, in my eyes, undercut by the article to which you’re posting this comment.

The truth is I agree with most of what you’re saying. I think, however, that in arguing quite rightly that criticism should transcend the artificial barriers between media, you’re inventing artificial barriers in the critical conversation, and contradicting your own point about the merits of interdisciplinarity.

@paraclete_pizza:disqus I’ve heard that argument before. It’s undercut somewhat in that Lichtenstein is still the one who appears on the syllabus for collegiate art classes, while people like Kirby have significantly smaller followings in academic circles (although not in popular circles). I learned it from the literature standpoint, where even though we read a book that eulogized romance comics and their contemporary genres (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) as expressions of artistic thought, Lichtenstein was still given more credence (he doesn’t even write!) than those he is supposed to have been drawing attention to.

It bothers me (and it bothers me in the history of science, as well) that we often seem to applaud people like Galileo or Antonie van Leeuwenhoek for their inventions (the telescope and light microscope, respectively) than what they did with those devices. The discovery that Jupiter had moons and the existence of red blood cells are far more important than the tools used to discover them. It may be that you can’t have one without the other, but you also shouldn’t focus on the tool to the exclusion of the discovery, and it seems to me that’s what has happened with Lichtenstein. He’s shown us comics possessed a depth beyond what we had imagined, but rather than following his lead (as astronomers and biologists did in the previous cases) the art community has instead immortalized Lichtenstein, the magnifying glass, than those he magnified. You still see articles that seem to be amazed that museums might even think to display people like Jack Kirby or George Herriman in the same building as ol’ Roy, let alone not show Roy at all in favor of those who came before him.

The AVC/GS schism will damn you all to hell!!! Repent, sinners!

Nah, I think the issue is that while evolution in art and media is going faster than ever, it’s still not going fast enough for people.
Media as a form of limiting format it dying out very clearly and will at some point only be held on to by the usual traditionalists. As devices become more and more able to do everything at the same time, the idea that cinema, tv, game, print and so on are vastly different things separated by unbridgeable gaps will fall by the wayside.

You also have to remember that for the vast part of human history our choice of media was very limited at any given time. There were the plastic arts, like sculpting and painting (which we barely consider media as such anymore), the theatrical arts and a limited selection of literary arts. Up until the renaissance nobody but the richest nobles owned a couple of illuminated manuscripts, then print rolled in and well until the invention of audio recording, that was it.
That explains pretty exactly how and where certain media get their sense of superiority from, seniority. Theater considers itself better than musical revue, which finds itself superior to cinema, which considers itself better than television and all look down on the new kid, games. Quality or actual merit has very little to do with it, I think, it’s all just a question of who did it first.

Now, gaming has a chance to go beyond that because it is far less form-limiting, more fluid than all its predecessors, but again, you have to give people time to accept these changes, because 30 years ago, computer games were beeping pixel things. The medium has changed in roughly a single generation from Pacman to Half Life 2. No other medium, with maybe the exception of the printing press, has had such an immediate and rampant evolution. And the movers and shakers, the people who write and produce for movies and tv, they just about grew up on Pacman and Tempest and Asteroids and Centipede. Those are games vastly of a different kind than what we get to play today.

So I think becrying some sort of eternal media divide is indeed silly, because we are, in comparison to other media, still at the forefront of gaming.
Cinema was invented roughly in the 1880s and it took until the 1920s for some real movies to come to light, like Nosferatu or Metropolis or Dr Mabuse. Compare the evolution of gaming in the same time period and it blows cinema out of the water in that regard.
We are still very much the first generation of gaming that transcends the aggressive bleeping and sparking of Arcade-style skill games, the first ones to experience narrative, emotional themes and character development. Even the advancement of background story to Super Mario from his first appearance in 1985 to today.

Gaming has in many ways already outclassed the innovation speed of all other media and influenced it very greatly. Just consider CGI and most filming techniques the gift gaming has given to the filmed picture. All these types of media are fusing together, with actors being employed for games, music being written, and so on.
Just give it some time.

@HobbesMkii:disqus Maybe I shouldn’t have said some games Are Not Important. I was more meaning for that to fit with Teti’s Games Are Important bit. I’m still gonna stand by my some Games Should Not Be Taken seriously. Ideally, that’s how all art should be. I mean, if someone who has never been exposed to art sees a Picasso picture, they’ll probably laugh, And I think that’s okay, Picasso’s pictures are funny. That doesn’t make them inferior to a Rembrandt picture. I don’t think a stody art history professor should frown upon that. Again, ideally, all of the “stuff” I referred to previously should be viewed like that. Hamlet isn’t better than Much Ado About Nothing just because everybody dies. You can make the argument that Hamlet is better, I just don’t think it should be based on those grounds. (PS I’m sure you’re aware that painting-of-a-comic-of-a-painting-of-a-comic low-or-high-art bit is from Calvin and Hobbes. It’s high art, because the final adaption is a painting. But wait, it’s being explored in a comic! *head explodes*)

@JohnTeti:disqus Well, maybe I’m wrong. I can’t say that I have a degree in contempary media, or that I wrote a dissertation on the history of cinema. Just to me, it seems as though games are taking longer…

Leading to my next point. @paraclete_pizza:disqus I thought what you said in reference to interactive art was very interesting. Going back to what i defined as “stuff”, I mentioned movies, books, sports, checkers. Video games hold a very interesting place there, because they’re something that can specifically set out to tell a story, like a movie or a book, but they’re also something that can be played, like other types of games. Maybe people in the spheres of non-interactive storytelling are fearful of this. It’s not like you see Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books being cited as classic literature, even though I’d say a great one would be better than most great regular books. And that’s because of the variety of ways to experience it. I remember reading Roger Ebert’s dismissal of video games as art. What REALLY bothered me about it was his base assumption; video games give people different experiences, and art shouldn’t give people different experiences. No. Not at all. When I listen to gangster rap, I’m going to have a completely different experience based on my enviroment in a very diverse lower middle class area,  compared to my friend who lives in a Baltimore ghetto, or my other friend who lives in a swanky suburb. Maybe my first friend likes it because it hits close to home; maybe my second friend likes it because it has a catchy hook. Doesn’t matter, it’s still art either way.

So hopefully, piggybacking on @Fluka:disqus , video games and interactive art starts to get recognized more in general. It’s beginning to happen, which is great! Thanks in part to this site. I just hope, that when we’re old and crotchety, we accept the next trend really quick.

TL; DR: Video games are cool! Yay! Pumpkin ales on me!

 @HobbesMkii:disqus : It sounds like we had some pretty different subjective experiences in college!

My mandatory freshman art history class focused on Modern and Contemporary gallery art (something I’m kind of glad it did, since that’s not something I had encountered before – even if it took me a few more years to come around to actually appreciating that stuff). But beyond that, there wasn’t a huge distinction between popular and “high” art forms, and that distinction was pretty universally seen as having died at least 20 years ago. My animation art history curriculum examined Looney Tunes alongside experimental animation, my video studio classes analyzed Stan Brackage films and ABBA videos as cultural artifacts, and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh’s big biennial art show, featured conceptual gallery artists like Trisha Donnelly as well as a gallery of ink drawings and original pages by Robert Crumb (whose stuff I also saw, incidentally, in the Venice Bienalle last year). When I was in school, the whole poppy Fort Thunder thing was looming large and the influence of, say, Kirby on Matt Brinkman or Sesame Street on Force Field was frankly and openly discussed. Our campus gallery ran shows like this, where comic art was hung in the gallery, as was fine art influenced by comics and comic culture. I had Clowes’s Art School Confidential comic recommended to me by one of my concept art professors.

While there was certainly a cultural distinction in Lichtenstein’s time, in my experience with art school and the art world, that distinction doesn’t really come into play any more. There’s a distinction between “gallery art” and “sequential art” and “film” and whatever, but in most institutions that distinction is practical and non-hierarchical. And I’d wager the number of publications or institutions where gallery art is held to be objectively more important than popular art is dwarfed by places and publications where video games are seen as totally awesome and contemporary art is seen as some kind of scam or waste of time.

Video games have a bit of a tougher row to hoe, since they’ve been a largely commercial medium for so long, and the proprietary nature of consoles made it near impossible for inspired individual visions to come to fruition. The concept of an “indie” game is a relatively novel thing (though of course there were exciting things happening with independent basement programmers in the PC world, but the obscurity of that scene probably meant it didn’t register in the larger culture at the time). Games were seen as art objects 10 years ago at my school, but that’s probably because the uni has a big CS department and is pretty tech-friendly. A decade later, though, games seem fairly well regarded as an art medium in most places (my grad school is much less tech-oriented, but my profs have been receptive of games I’ve made for projects, and one of the new faculty is all about game design in art education).