Esquire has a great story on The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls by Jason Fagone (Nov. 20, 2008) which features “Jason Rohrer’s solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love”. Rohrer created the game Passage about which Clint Hocking of Ubisoft said:
Why can’t we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know? We wonder all the time if games are art, if computers can make you cry, and all that. Stop wondering. The answer is yes to both. Here’s a game that made me cry. It did. It really did.
I balk at the idea that a game to mean something has to have “lesson.” This reminds of the tedious pedagogical dialogues of the 18th century which really would have been better presented as lessons. The meaning of works that don’t present explicit opinions lies in the reflection provoked. Thus they are more like questions than answers. Or, to be more accurate, they are like a path of questioning since a game has the time to move questioning.
Thanks to Peter O for this.