We have long passed making children’s toys and now can concentrate on serious business.

It was once said that video games by their nature cannot be art. Now that Flower has done away with that prejudice and the Citizen Kane of video games, Portal, is extant, we can collectively look at the art form critically.

To view video games critically is a new approach, but only because video games themselves are so very new. From the beginning the the critical frame work was setup in the form of reviews in many gaming magazines (most now represented by online counterparts) and now they are judged in the same way movies and books are.

The primary benefit of video games to other forms of art is that they let the player be other people. To finally take the second person “you” and incorporate it into a story. Literature has long struggled with this, there are a few stories written in the second person, but they’re gimmicky and often come across as an insecure first person narration. Video games, however, have many more second person narratives than first. In video games, first and third (I and him) are really just you and you alone. All video games except for RTS and god games are you games (and a strong case can be made for RTS and god-view games being second person as well). This ability to place a person in a foreign personal space is very great. The novel perhaps surpasses the video game in empathizing with characters, but the level of removal from the subject is unavoidable because the reader is never in direct control of the protagonist. I do not wish to say that video games are better than novels, or paintings, or any other art form, only that they like all art have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Like all art, video games have both good and bad examples. The below is inspired by two things. One is a particularly bad game that I played recently, itself violating rules 7, 24, and 25. The other is The Elements of Style, a work whose influence is plain in the following.

The following are either rules governing playability, player irritation, or bad form and are in their respective sections. Read more »