Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Michaël Samyn is sick of games.

So Michaël Samyn, if I'm not reading it wrong, thinks interactive entertainment is hamstrung by rules, hamstrung by being games. Rules, of course, are basically what games are. Give me all the rules for Halo 3 and I could play it with pen and paper, assuming I had the patience to do all the calculations myself, draw every frame pixel-by-pixel, and artificially slow down my reaction time so that the game was still challenging when every action took months to complete.

As it turns out I do have the patience for that, but Bungie won't return my calls.

"Let games be fun," says Michaël Samyn. And while we're at it, let's let pictures be porn. Sculpture, too, since the whole art form has its roots in statuettes of portly headless women. Why weigh pictures and sculpture down with all this meaning, all this depth? I declare it purposeless. I am tired of it, I say, tired of the whole debate, and I shall place myself outside of it. Above it, actually, if that's all right.

Some people are trying to give meaning and artistry to the medium of games, Michaël, and if you don't like it then at least explain why.

And, no, you really don't explain why you think games shouldn't be meaningful, or why meaningful things shouldn't be games. You give basically one reason, namely that all people do in games is "obey rules and follow commands." Well, obviously nothing meaningful can come out of an experience in which you-

http://playthisthing.com/train

Oh, sorry. I was just rudely interrupted by that link to a writeup of Train, a game in which you play as a train conductor, jamming people into train cars and ferrying them to their destination- which, when you reach, you discover is Auschwitz. Just following orders, as they say. Or, rules. Commands. But obviously it would be a better, more fun game if your destination was Candyland.

Anyway, the need to follow rules and commands is a restraint that's utterly meaningless in real life. What could we learn about ourselves by examining the rules we follow, the commands we obey? Nothing? Dare I say less than nothing? I'm gonna go with negative infinity on this one, just to be safe. So I-

http://mightyjilloff.dessgeega.com/

Another uninvited link, all up in my biz. That's Mighty Jill Off, where you play a submissive in a sexual relationship, ascending a perilous obstacle course at the whims of your mistress. In Mighty Jill Off, rules and commands are not just restrictions but kinks, a source of perverse pleasure. Since it's a personal statement about a sexual relationship, maybe it shouldn't be a game at all, but a drier, less fun form of interactive entertainment. I can't be all that important to communicate that the sub/dom relationship is not only based on following commands, but fun as well, can it?

It cannot!

So at this point I'm probably done being sarcastic. My two examples are outliers, I admit, but on a more basic level, games have goals, and for those goals to be meaningful, it's often necessary, or at least useful, for the goal to be tied to a story. And if you've got a story, why not make it a GOOD one? Or at least try! Even when games don't squeeze every drop of potential out of the medium they exist in, you can't just ask them to stop trying to be interesting.

I admit the field of interactive entertainment would be broader and more interesting if more people were doing what Tale of Tales was doing. But the dominance of games is not an indictment of their value.