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Engaging in conversations about–well, pretty much anything of substance (and occasionally without substance) –is one of my favourite pastimes. Certain topics appeal to me more than others, as with everyone. Math and the more theoretical sciences are, to me, essential subjects to understand in order to form a proper empirical basis for how you perceive and inhabit your own perspective on the world. However, they are just impossible to make good conversations with, since the only people interested in talking about them are the experts, and they likely have little interest in talking to a lowly human being such as myself. With all of that said, I respect scientists and mathematicians for their innumerable contributions to the mechanical belly of our industrialized information society.

This leads me to reflect that the most fascinating conversations I have had are generally about subjects about which I know very little compared to the person I am speaking to or, most often, simply listening to. I am a sponge for information and love to engage in debates over finer points of detail, whether these finer points are contained in the “real” world or in fiction. In fact, people are far less reluctant to delve deeply into the substrata of issues where the nitty-gritty meets the broad idea when the topic is a fictional account. One particular friend of mine makes it a habit to annoy me in the most ingenuous way possible: he says things that I hold to be completely ridiculous, and then forces me to reevaluate my stance, which is generally against whatever he just said. On the rare occasions where we agree completely, I tend to get bored and fall into a gentle ennui, neither zoning out completely nor getting animated the way I do when I disagree completely.

This brings up the issue at hand: game “criticism,” which, as it stands presently, is limited almost exclusively to reviews and features. Mainline game journalists, when reflecting upon their reviews in interviews and podcasts, tend to get bogged down in the responses they got to the reviews and, most infuriatingly of all, in the entirely pointless and pedantic issue of how scoring systems work. These insipid scoring systems, while helpful as buying guides for clueless parents trying to get their son or daughter a proper Christmas present, as well as functioning quite well as fodder for incessant fanboy chattering over the relative merits of a game that scored “an 8.9″ rather than a “full 9.0,”are completely unnecessary and feed the impression to outsiders that games are little more than gadgets. After all, one observes that in every major broad-based (i.e. not specific to gaming) publication, all news about games is lumped into the “Technology” section. This is both unfortunate in being confusing–if games are to be amalgamated into any section, it should be Movies–and in being completely inaccurate. Games, while at their most literal and basic level composed of ones and zeroes and circuit boards that qualify as gadgetry, are far more than the simply sum of their technical parts.

The fundamental issue that most gamers have with outsiders is that people who do not play the same kinds of games that they do–the shooters, the RPGs, etc.–don’t take games “seriously.” One probable cause of at least some of this shared sentiment is that games are often treated by gamers themselves as objects to be enjoyed as being “cool” and “beautiful” and not as serious works that deserve to be taken seriously and contemplated on anything more than the most superficial of levels. When a friend walks up to me and talks about recent games that he played strictly in terms of the pure visceral thrills of killing and the adrenaline of competition, I am often guilty of encouraging this. I am completely at fault for not taking most games very seriously. Or worse, I take games seriously for the wrong reasons and end up being blindly devoted to some idea of what that game is. This has, I am sure, exasperated one or more of my friends at any given time. I am simply encouraging those who dedicate significant time and, more importantly, significant thought to the games they play, to consider thinking about a game on more than just the surface level.

That surface level is comprised of the mechanical jigsaw puzzle of numerical nonsense that every game is comprised of. When reviewers discuss a game, they tend to discuss what a game’s parts are, and not what the game is, what the game is trying to say, or even how successful it is. Nearly every review of Atlus’ Contact, for instance, focuses almost entirely upon the “boring” battle system, the simple graphics, and the bizarre plot. These are just the pieces to the puzzle, and I will be the first to admit that the game’s battle system is less than fully dynamic and that the graphics are simple and the plot and atmosphere are–to put it mildly–off-kilter.

But where most game critics would leave the conversation right there, give the game a 7.5, and move onto the next game, I believe that the discussion should take place over how these elements fit together into a cohesive whole. Contact’s brilliance lies in the execution of an idea. It is a well-constructed and often hilarious satire of the Japanese RPG that subverts all of the tropes of that genre and infuses into them a story and an atmosphere that contain both intriguing surrealist elements and a fairly touching and simple story that features not a single element that is both cliché and used in an uninteresting way. Everything fits together so seamlessly that you can wile away countless hours in the game just acting out the possibilities of the only morality system in a game that does not annoy me to death.

More generally, and in a more hopeful key, I just want to challenge all of those who talk about games–which includes myself–to change the way they think about the medium. To approach a game and not just stop after finishing it and ascribe one-word summaries of whether you liked it or not. If we as gamers want to earn respect for what we do, we have to begin treating our hobby with more gravity. Not necessarily turn into art critics who wear funny hats and condemn lowbrow entertainment. Rather, we should expand the conversations we are already having, and make it known that they are going on. That’s what I am going to strive for, and I hope at least a few people will follow my lead.