Actually I think the distinction you make of incomprehension is pretty insightful. To me, that fits with what I’m saying in this article more than if you were getting the cold shoulder from everyone. It shows that people are ready to accept games as entertainment, as just being there without being a problem, but not as being worthy of further study or deeper interest. Their preconception is not that games are somehow immoral and a bad influence, as it might have been a decade ago, but that games are superfluous and unimportant.

I wonder what age group these people are? I’d imagine that it’d be spread, but I’d also wager that a fair few of them fall into the bracket that is supposed to have grown up with games: the demographic that we take for granted when we’re talking about ‘games as art’, or ‘getting games accepted’ or whatever variant on that. I know from my own personal experience, plenty of people my own age are incapable of understanding why anyone would want to write about games, or critique them, or study them. I’m halfway through my second videogames-related thesis and I still don’t know how to answer the “what are you writing on” question at parties. As you say, how do you explain that to people who don’t even understand the idea of an internet culture?

The cold-shoulder-after-small-talk thing usually comes from other women I’m trying to make friends with.

More common than rejection, though, is incomprehension — fewer people than you’d think even understand the idea of covering games as a business (the financial strategies of publishers, interviews with developers, etc), let alone as a medium worthy of criticism.

However, I do see the latter one changing. Maybe they’re just trying to be polite, but when I talk about game crit people seem to “get it,” even if they just say “yeah man, wow, games are so complicated now, like movies.”

Actually, the thing that seems to confuse people the most is that I work online from home. Funnily enough, that’s the bit that requires the most explanation.

But yeah. Trying to talk about games writing in the real world will always keep any delusions of grandeur (ha) in check.

I dunno that I’m so much ashamed as it is I just get tired of trying to explain it to people to whom even the idea of internet culture is enormously foreign. Short answer: “I’m a journalist.” Midlength answer: “I’m a tech journalist.” Longest answer: “You know what Variety does for Hollywood? Like, covers it as a business? That’s what I do, only with the video game industry.”

Here’s to boring them into submission!

Funny you should mention racism given the nature of an upcoming article. Stay tuned.

I agree that a major reason people don’t take games seriously is because they’ve never played one. But I also think, as I say in the article, that a lot of people play games and don’t take them seriously just because they automatically lump them in as ‘an entertainment’. That’s why we need to keep talking about them in a serious fashion, and there is no more direct way than the ‘art’ debate.

The reason it’s so hard to sell a lot of people on the idea that games are worthy art, I think, is that they’ve never experienced it. They might have played a great game, but if it didn’t make them feel something deeply, they can’t see why it should be called art. A lot of older people may never be able to get this feeling from a game, but generations change.

The word art isn’t very useful, because it can have such broad or specific meanings. What we want is for games to be taken seriously. That will happen over time, whether we debate it or not, although having the argument could certainly help hurry the process along a bit.

(By the way: hi, Dan! We met the other week at the pub with Harry, in case the RMIT URL didn’t give me away.)

Maybe you’re right, but I’m yet to hear a word I like, and I’m not sure that at this point, any word will catch on.

Maybe the word ‘game’ will simply evolve a new context as the years go by?

But, to a certain extent that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the other connotations that ‘art’ brings; the ’serious medium’ connotations that for most people apply not just to visual art but to literature, poetry, some cinema, and most music. The type of ‘art’ that gets people talking, creates a vibrant cultural atmosphere and even gets governments and funding bodies interested.

Thanks for the first comment, Dan! A thought-provoking one too!