The Value of Video Games

Stories are valuable, they aren’t just entertainment, they are gateways to empathy, they connect us to the world and each other.

Video games are valuable because of the most obvious reason, they are interactive. They offer an experience no other medium can compete with. Full immersion, investment, and control. Nothing happens without your input, your decisions shape the way things unfold. Just think of the possibilities. It’s wonderful. It oftentimes feels like magic.

In recent years’ video games have started incorporating more serious subject matter, made characters and narrative the focus. But even more recently games have started to begun to push the previously established barriers of what a video game is. Some say it's because video games are still a nascent medium, they haven't been around as long as film or literature. It's also been suggested it's because the medium is gaining more mass appeal. I would argue it's the other way around, that because video games have become more diverse than ever, because they are reaching to such lofty storytelling heights and pushing the boundaries of whats previously been considered possible that they are gaining more wide spread appeal. Whatever the reason may be video games are more diverse than ever. They simulate what it's like to live with a mental disorder (Depression Quest). They limit interaction and focus on telling a deeper story (Gone Home, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture). They play out entirely outside of the game (Her Story). Some are based in reality, and serve as sort of diaries (Cibele, The Beginner’s Guide, and That Dragon, Cancer). 

These games aren’t simply important because of their ability to pull at your heartstrings, or because their uniqueness and profoundness in the medium. That undervalues them. They have significance and value because they make us think, they plant the seeds that lead to introspection, to conversation, and ultimately empathy. They help us understand something we may have been struggling to come to grips with ourselves. It opens up the possibility for meaningful conversation with those around us. To better understand and think broadly and meaningfully about bigger questions, the kinds of questions without answers but that are worth thinking about regardless. 

The Beginner’s Guide is a story about our connections with art.

Cibele is a story about modern, technology dependent, relationships.

That Dragon, Cancer is a story about life, death, and faith.

These are not entirely new topics for video games, but it’s certainly a first for games to explore these things in such depth, with such maturity and in the examples listed above, to be autobiographical. THAT is wholly new territory and it’s incredibly brave of the developers of these games to design games based even partially on their real lives, to expose themselves so nakedly to a large audience. 

These mature and sometimes personal stories are a fantastic and heartening trend in video games that show the medium in a better light. It’s the early steps towards maturity and respectability for a medium so often chastised as being ‘for kids’, ‘violent’, and ‘a waste of time’. 

Video games matter the same way all art matters, because experiencing it brings us closer together. It allows us to feel every emotion, understand the world and people around us, art is the world around us. And video games are art.