I think computer games are fundamentally noble at their core, they divert the computer from the twin evils of work and the Web. That is a fundamental and even missionary good. That's the core of the fantastic premises they imply. On that core, you can build danger and wit and history and reflection and poetry and politics. But the dignity is there unless you remove it. A fighting game is fundamentally more dignified than office work. Than busy work. Than useless inhumane work. It is more poetic and political than browsing social media. The dignity remains.
It is a fundamental, atomic question of what electrified rocks should be doing next to our bodies. It is a challenge to the impure world of work and pressure and hate and discrimination. It is a threat to the impure world of worry. It is an attack on our nihilism. That's not the same as fantasy or escapism. It is not a Second World but an attack on the first. It is a war on the inhuman conditions of modernity.
The only way to lose the dignity inherent in that condition is to weigh the player down with more guilt and fear and worry, the very tools that keep us from building any kind of common humanity. When you make a game that says "worry" "be fearful" or "feel guilt", you are closer in spirit to a war game with racial slurs in the chatroom than you are a piece of art on a gallery wall.
In this way, games with serious themes run the risk of replacing dignity with worry. The needle, if threaded, brings that fundamental nobility back through the serious topic back for us.
Interactivity. Serious games. Design. None of these remotely approach the fundamental purpose of electrifying rocks and ancient forests to entertain our bodies. Intellectually, academically, socially, commercially, artistically. The erotic fan art of a game character is fundamentally more dignified than any sentence that begins with “games should”.
When a game has well-loved art and music and kinetic things, the dignity explodes in a Cambrian moment. It fulfils the purpose of the rocks and metals in the computer chip and the plastic mould. It completes the dignified cycle of our planet - redistributing carbon elements of the earth to make good the experience of life in the moment.
Entertainment is the only noble act.
This isn’t a manifesto of any kind but an expression of an instinct that sometimes gets worn down by cynicism.
Forgive me if you read this again from me in longer form one day, on old tree pulp in the books that call my hands to write, and again in the form of games that call my hands to make. Dignity calls, despite it all.