Have our players reached maturity yet?

I wonder if the people who were wishing for more when The Graveyard came out are starting to feel silly now. It’s been over 4 years now since we released it. And, even though the “official” games industry doesn’t seem to have moved much, a lot has happened alongside of it. A lot of games have been released by many different authors and a lot of talking has been done. And although the hardcore ludic branch of the spectrum is stronger than ever, recently being reinforced by a new popularity of non-video games, there has never been as much acceptance and appreciation for more artistic types of interactive work in the games audience.

Do they feel silly now, asking for more story or for puzzles or -jokingly- for enemies to overcome? Or are we ready, as a group, to engage with pure interaction? With doing things for the sake of doing them. With making up our own minds as to what these things mean. With being the creators of our own entertainment. With using these interactive experiences as tools. Tools for self-exploration, for amusement, for investigation of certain themes. Or do we still need the author to take us by the hand, to make us feel things, to tell us a story? Have we grown up as players yet?

That is a question we seldom ask, is it? We’re often going on about how young, even infantile, videogames are as a medium. But we seldom question the maturity of our players. At least not within the play activity (outside of it, sadly, there has been some lamentable displays of childishness; but many others have commented on this already).

In fact, many of the more mainstream games seem to assume no such maturity exists. The simplistic stories, the excessive tutorials, the extreme hands holding all point to an assumption in the designers that the players of their work are children, or grown-ups with the mentality of children.

Children don’t like art films. Children seldom read literature. Classical music is mostly wasted on children. Children get bored in museums. Do we become children again when we play a videogame?

It takes maturity to appreciate a story by Kafka, a cantata by Bach or a film by Duras. Not just in the sense of having had some life experience to frame the artistic one. But also in the sense of discipline, initiative and endurance. We have to be able to bring ourself to the work, to enter a state in which we are receptive to its beauty, to let go of many of our expectations, even of the expectation to understand or decipher the meaning of the piece. It takes maturity to accept a mystery without feeling the need to comprehend it.

Have we achieved that sort of maturity yet when engaging with videogames?

It is odd to think that the same people who have no problem getting through Beckett or Godard would not be able to deal with an artistic game. And yet that was exactly the situation 4 years ago, when The Graveyard came out. It will be interesting to see how things have changed when Bientôt l’été is released.