Today I gave a talk at NYU Polytechnic’s Game Innovation Lab on solving technical problems with game design. It was a really fun talk with some great questions from the attendees.

I decided not to use any Powerpoint slides and just drew diagrams on a whiteboard, which means I don’t have a deck to share with the curious. But one attendee turned out to be Leigh Alexander, news director for Gamasutra.com, and she’s apparently writing up my talk for the site. I’ll link it when it’s live.

(I wrote this a couple months ago but wanted to capture it here for future use.)

I think the question of games as art is a very valid one but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it formulated in a way I can believe in.

Every medium has its own forms of excellence. Even film and theatre, which in some sense are very akin arts, are radically different in how they achieve their best artistic effects. If you then consider how we experience and assess photography, dance, sculpture, installations, etc., it’s clear that every medium has its distinct artistic signifiers and components.

The problem with the discussion of art in videogames is that it has been so reductionist in making comparisons to other mediums. There are people who see videogame art in the form of strong narratives, where sharp characters and good writing and voice performance elevates the experience. In other cases it’s the aesthetics that are perceived as artistic – literally the graphics, the art direction, the lighting and rendering.

I think when you look at art in videogames you have to look at what is fundamentally distinct. Praising the writing and characters in GTA4 is to admit it’s got nothing on the Sopranos. Loving the painterly expression of Braid or the dramatic stylings of Shadow of the Colossus is to invoke all of visual art, against which videogames cannot distinguish themselves.

So what is truly distinct about the medium? I would argue it is agency, the notion that the audience is a free-will agent in the experience. I’m not talking about free will in the sense of a sandbox game like GTA. I am referring very directly to the loop between the player’s input, the resulting action on screen, the player’s processing of that result, and the subsequent input the player makes in response. I think it is this agency loop that distinguishes videogames from all other media and it is here that we should look for artistic excellence.

This is a very odd thing to judge a medium by because we are trained by other popular media to judge art in terms of Shakespeare, Scorcese, and Rembrandt. The closest frame of reference I can think of for how videogame art might be achieved is to put yourself into the role of an athlete – say, a gymnast. A top gymnast explores degrees of agency most people never experience. Their relationship to their tools – the balance beam, the uneven bars – is very similar to a game’s agency loop. They perform endless repetition, gaining mastery by making the slightest changes to their physical inflections. (Actually, a golfer’s swing is another good parallel.) When you watch the Olympics and you see a basically identical routine performed by two different gymnasts, you comprehend the extent to which their sport is defined in tiny slices of input, result, and response. The problem, of course, is that while you can watch a top gymnast you can’t share a YouTube link to the experience of being a gymnast. And it’s that problem that is the biggest obstacle to the promulgation of games as art. It’s easy to show a clip or a screenshot and say look at that artwork, watch this scene. But then you have failed to show what is really important about videogames.

What videogames do that gymnastics and golf can’t is interject narrative and aesthetics into that agency loop and to set that loop into an imaginative environment within which reality is suspended and anything is possible. That is an awe-inspiring earthquake of an opportunity – nothing has been invented with such profound potential since the evolutionary invention of the imagination itself. We can now put ourselves, kinetically, inside our minds. That’s jaw-dropping.

And once you come to that realization, it’s clearer than ever that our industry is a shit factory.

This is the entire 48-minute press event we did last week unveiling our Kinect for Kids initiative.

Xbox & Kinect News: The Future of Gaming and Entertainment: Video Gallery

Microsoft is making big news with the world premiere of Kinect for Xbox 360. Find out about the future of controller-free gaming and entertainment through our collection of videos, articles, top stories in the press and more.

This is my baby: a new Xbox Kinect project for preschool and kindergarten kids that turns real storybooks into immersive experiences and inspires a love of reading.

Our group at Microsoft is creating a bunch of Xbox Kinect games for kids, including interactive TV we’re making with Sesame Workshop and National Geographic.

Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360 Teams With Disney for Fun, Sesame Workshop for Learning Products

The company wants to redefine learning with interactive TV, book and games offers that allow users to interact with the likes of Grover and Cookie Monster and let kids play with characters from "The Incredibles," "Toy Story 3" and "Cars 2."

I think this is really interesting news. In the console videogame industry, studio acquisitions have historically been of big retail-game developers. Twisted Pixel is a 25-person shop in Austin known for XBLA games. Even their first retail title, Gunstringer, started as XBLA and scaled up. They’re a great studio and I hope this works out.

Gamasutra – News – Microsoft Acquires Splosion Man Dev Twisted Pixel

Microsoft revealed today that it has acquired Splosion Man developer Twisted Pixel Games

My friends at Bootsnake Games are making Containment, a new iPad/PC/Mac game that is basically George Romero’s Bejeweled. It’s a very cool match-three game with zombies played with interactive environments, boss fights, special attacks and equipment, and more. It’s ingenuous and fun. Check out this early trailer for a look!

Containment Trailer!

So I know not everyone out there got to make it to the Appnation panel at PAX where we gave a gameplay demo of Containment. We here at Castle Bootsnake felt bad about this, as we really do want to share the game with all of you. So we set up multiple meetings to work out a way to remedy this situati…

Great, rave review from Edge of the new Gears of War game. I haven’t played a minute of it yet but am really looking forward to it. And I’m particularly glad to see them single out new Gears writer Karen Traviss for praise — I thought the first Gears story was embarrassingly incoherent and I’ve been encouraged to see Epic embrace a veteran writer for this game.

Gears Of War 3 review – Edge Magazine

The game’s arsenal provides a dizzying amount of options, each carefully balanced to a different tactical preference. For players who like to smell the breath of the enemy they’re taking out, the Gnasher is joined by a sawn-off shotgun that deals devastating wide-angle damage, but only at point-bla…

In case you’ve been wondering just when the reliably idiosyncratic Japanese videogame industry would begin making batshit crazy games for Kinect, your patience has been rewarded. I described this to a colleague as “satanic baseball” and that’s as good a starting point as any. I’ve played it and let’s just say it defies expectations of mundane reality.

First Gameplay Footage of a Diabolical Kinect Game

Diabolical Pitch is an upcoming Kinect game from Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio responsible for titles like No More Heroes. It's a baseball game.

An iPhone turn-based WW1 combat game licensed from Call of Cthulhu? My interest level could not reach measurable levels even with an EKG.

Our First Look at Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

Seen here are images from the upcoming Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land iPhone game. In them we catch a glimpse of some of the game's characters under attack by the undead and Dark Young. Call of Cthulhu: