are clothes going to all be one style, one colour? no will all music end up being generic pop crap? no. as much as technology will change, the diversity in styles of video games will remain as wide as a fat mans butt.
"The time has come for video gaming to move beyond a simple diversion, and become something more. Escapism isn't enough: it's about time for video games to be disturbing, depressing, timely, political, thought-provoking, and, above all, meaningful."
He also said: "In the end, the move of video games from mere escapism to that of a higher art form is not so much a necessity as it is an inevitability: even though the industry is currently in no position to allow such a thing, technology will eventually progress to the point where mainstream society won't have any choice but to stand up and take notice. It may take decades, but video games will move beyond their escapist roots. Still, though: why wait?"
No. There are still fun, humorous, light-hearted books and movies even though we have War and Peace and Citizen Kane. Every summer we get silly action flicks and romantic comedies. He's an ignorant critic if he thinks those older media have evolved into some sort of dreary, serious doomsaying set of prophecies.
He's ignorant for thinking games are simply escapism. As Machu said, they are often skill-based or thought-based which make them a valuable pursuit in and of themselves. I'm not surprised a critic would be judging games from the standpoint of older media, but games do not only involve narrative - and a good thing at that, because game narratives generally tend to be pretty poor.
He's also ignorant if he thinks games have to evolve in the same way as older media in order to mature and be universally recognised. Following that path, games would just be a hollow imitation of past media. I'd much rather see what games can uniquely do as a medium. A huge part of gaming is experiential rather than descriptive - why ignore this important defining aspect? The game medium has the potential to go much further than older media formats. And focusing discussion on, say, political ideologies would be a pretty poor/boring/wasteful use of the gaming medium's possibilities imo.
P.S. From what I've gathered, the "mainstream" has already stood up and taken notice of games. If anything, games are the mainstream these days. It's about time we got the misconception that games are a little-known, edge-of-society activity out of our heads. A repairman who visited my house chatted with me about Ocarina of Time and the Commodore 64, and I talked to a girl about Worms Armageddon not so long ago... and she brought up the subject. I'm still a little awed by that. 100% of kids aged 7 and under in the UK have played video games. If that doesn't count as mainstream then I don't know what does.
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Topic: The end of fun games as we know them?
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