Lately, No Donkeys: And one to grow on.

I was reading a friend’s blog, Uppwords, and he had a post on which I had to comment. However, the comment became exceedingly long, so I turned it into a post to promote his blog. I say to you sir, bravo. The post was about the current view many people have towards video games as a child’s form of entertainment. Please do read it.

I'm sorry to admin that it's a stigma that many things carry. Chess is viewed as a very adult game, but I can play a game based on the same principles if I start up Age of Empires^tm or Civilization^tm. Why is the computer version stigmatized? Computer chess doesn’t carry that. In fact computers have beaten some very accomplished chess players. Why does Monopoly^tm and Risk^tm garner more respect than SimCity^tm or a Real Time Strategy game? Do people think that they are easier for some reason? Because I will tell you they can test the abilities of some of the smartest people I know. And the computer version is often made difficult without depending on random chance for a lot of the difficulty. In Monopoly^tm a die drives a great deal of success or failure, but in SimCity^tm it’s mostly your decisions and shortsightedness that are your downfall. Some games are for children, some games are for adults, and some work well for both. Some of the most fun I’ve had with family and friends is playing four player versus on Mario Cart 64^tm. To automatically assign video games to one category is shortsighted and it does the creators of some of the games a disservice.

The same thing happens to genres such as Science Fiction and animation. It’s an elitist view that new and different things that are not mainstream entities are not capable of being worthy of praise and having true merit. They are merely computer games or laser blasting science fiction stories or cartoons. What possible use could they be? It took a long time for literature to truly begin to recognize that SF could tell wonderful stories in ways that are extraordinarily difficult to tell in classical literature. It’s still an uphill battle for movies, television, and games to get recognition. But then Alfred Hitchcock received lifetime achievement awards from the Directors Guild of America and from the American Film Institute, without ever having received an Oscar for best director. I’m just glad that things like Princess Mononoke, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, 2001: A Space Odyssey, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and other try to break out of the neat little compartments people build for movies of their genres.

I'm reminded of when I watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Enterprise visited an androgenous civilization. One of the male crewmembers and a scientist from the planet began working together. The scientist revealed that sometimes deviants were born in their species that had predispositions towards male or female as a throwback to earlier ancestry, and that she had a female predisposition. They hit it off, but her people saw such deviations as an illness, so they took her into custody and adjusted her brain to eliminate the feelings. This episode came on during the whole “Don’t ask Don’t Tell” thing with the US military. I happened to watch it for the first time with 2 people that didn’t like homosexuality, or the possibility that they could join the military. That day we had been having a heated discussion about the topic, and I shut up when I realized I couldn’t get them to look outside of their narrow view. I often play the opposing opinion just to get people to widen their view of the world. Near the end of the episode Person 1 wondered, “Why can’t they just let her leave with him?” Person 2 turned to Person 1 and said, “You realize they are talking about homosexuality?” I must tell you that the wave of recognition, shock, and seeing the amazing view of having been shot straight out of the little rut (s)he lived in his/her eyes was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. (S)He was shaken to the very foundations. Person 1 then turned to me. I simply said, “Yup,” and then I went back to watching the episode to let the person thought about it. I have found very few genres that can pull someone so far out of their normal point of view, without their knowledge, and then suddenly pull back the curtains to show them where they really are. The timing was almost inbelievable, and I dearly loved it.