Stories and Games (3): Experiencing Fiction

Final part of the Stories and Games series is up on ihobo today. Here’s an extract:

Could games be the ultimate artworks? I've heard this view advanced on two distinct but related grounds. Firstly, there is the argument that because the player of game has the experience happen directly for them, games are superior works of art to other media like films and books where the experience is second hand. The trouble with this is that the reasons why we esteem art have very little to do with whether the relevant experiences happen to us directly or not – if this were not the case, Shakespeare could only truly be appreciated by actors performing his plays, not by the audience. It may well be the case that in assessing games as artworks our direct participation is vital – but this is an artefact of how games work as artworks, not an argument that games must be superior artworks.

You can read the whole of Stories and Games (3): Experiencing Fiction over on ihobo.com.