When you first discover videogames,
like we did in two thousand and two,
it's easy to recognize something wonderful and new.
Even if the technology had no power to its name,
videogames offered us mysterious worlds to explore,
adventures to have and strangely living creatures to adore.
To the outsider, videogames look like films in which you play the lead,
paintings into which you could climb,
or virtual architecture that did not suffer from gravity or time.
A free medium in which, it seems, you could create anything you need.
Anything that an artist could possibly dream
could be created by a game development team.
This is what videogames in us did inspire.
Bright eyed and filled with ambition and desire.
In order to better understand
this new context for our work,
we played hundreds of games until it hurt.
Most of them showed a creative hand.
And all were inspiring
but not without tiring.
More often than we had planned,
we found it very hard
to get to the delightful part.
Rather than giving us access to fantastic lands
and putting us on adventure's way,
most games did not allow us to play.
After the first few minutes of exploration,
the game said "STOP! You shall not go
any further!" in some form or so.
Without any sort of justification
unfriendly creatures approached us in packs
and decided to attack.
To kill or be killed was the rule to apply.
Sometimes we found a bump or a pit.
We could see the landscape, beautifully lit.
But no matter how hard we tried,
we just could not make the jump
over that godforsaken pit or bump.
We were baffled to a tee.
Here we had what was probably to most wonderful creative technology ever invented.
And all people could imagine doing with it was playing some games, rigid and demented.
There is no bad blood between games and me.
Games are obviously fun for us and you.
There are game-like structures in many things we do.
Looking at a painting or a film is a sort of game,
so is talking with a gentleman or a dame.
Even the rotation of the moon around the earth and of the earth around the sun,
seems like the planets are having a graceful immense sort of fun.
But what we encountered in videogames didn't have much to do with that delightful mood.
The games in videogames, by comparison, are harsh and crude.
Maybe because they are made with computers by armies of geeks,
and maybe because they were invented when the machines were still primitive and weak.
Competition is often central in a videogame.
Video-sports would have been a better name.
That would have made things a lot more clear.
And we would have been spared many a tear.
For a reason that we do not know,
most videogames demand that you do well
some abstract activities designed for show
and make you repeat them until you excel.
And when you're finally good,
the game becomes harder to do,
so playing never could
get simply easy for you.
In fact it is considered good design
when a game makes you suffer and pine.
That doesn't mean there are no amazing things.
Entire worlds have been produced,
Endearing queens and charming kings.
Lovely little interactions that do enthuse.
But even with today's technological sophistication,
most videogames are about assassinations,
about bringing packages from barrel to stock,
and finding keys for doors that are always locked.
An audience of fanatics is always blamed,
By the developers and publishers of videogames.
Apparently, they need spacemen and elves,
in order to feel good about themselves.
But that is as self-fulfilling a prophecy as ever.
If you make dumb games, don't expect players to be clever.