Faith.

We were complimented on our faith in videogames. It felt nice to hear at first. But then I wondered why should this be a compliment? Isn’t it normal to have faith in videogames? Doesn’t everyone see how wonderful this medium is and how great its potential?

And then I looked around me, at the social platforms that we share with our friends and peers. And I noticed that many people talk about games, regular games. With great enthusiasm. As if it is any news that they had fun playing a game. Imagine a large gathering of grown ups continuously raving that this or that candy tastes well. Welcome to the world that Tale of Tales exists in!

It seems like even people with a good head on their shoulders are obsessed with games these days. It’s trendy. They are certainly intelligent enough to realize that these games are all Skinner boxes that just trigger the release of certain chemicals in their brains and condition behavior. They even sometimes criticize some of these -the ones that their parents play on Facebook- but then they go on to sing the praises of yet another simplistic twitchy puzzle or another kitschy murder simulator.

At Tale of Tales, we still have faith in videogames as a medium. Why does that sentence suddenly make us sounds like dinosaurs? Is it over? Has the window of opportunity for videogames to become a medium closed? Is it all panem et circenses as of now? No more art? No more joy? No more wonder about the beauty of existence? Just endless “depressed fun”? Because we are entitled and we are “free”? Nietzschean bacchanals until the end of times? Voluntary regression to some earlier state of our species’ evolution?

No matter really. That is not a world I want to live in. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, this is a choice between continuing on my path or death. Either I continue with hope for humanity, and in support of those who make our species worthy of such hope, or I stop. If there is no hope for this world, if there is no beauty, if all that is left is fun and games ad infinitum, I do not want to live.