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I was casting about for a good topic to write about in this month’s installment of Culture Clash, my montly column for the International Game Developers Association, and this one fell into my lap. It is, after all, American Politics Season – and a completely irrelevant race in the state of Maine got my attention. Topic discovered!

In other news, this is actually the second time I’ve used a play on World of Warcraft in my title- wait… third time? I’ll have to check. In any case it’s not the first. Originality and me, we’re not always, you know, together. Enjoy!

Officially speaking, my job with Culture Clash, the column I’ve written for the International Game Developers Association for nine years now, is to talk about how gaming culture relates to, is perceived by, and can influence the “rest” of culture. Beyond that I have a pretty free hand it terms of selecting topics. Of course, back in 2003 when I started, there were a lot more differences between “gamer culture” and just “culture.”

Still, the culture of gaming does exist, and as terms and phrases come to define aspects of it, I occasionally like to pause and consider what some of the constructs of gaming mean to me. Here we’re doing “social gaming” – or, rather, what “social gaming” would mean if they’d asked me to define it.

Which they did not.

There are giants in this industry, and then there’s Ernest Adams. A developer, lecturer, scholar and teacher, Ernest’s book Fundamentals of Game Design is the essential text on the subject, while his newest work Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, written with Joris Dormans, is a much-needed formalization of game mechanics grammar and understanding.

In his spare time, Ernest founded the International Game Developers Association and shipped 15 games over 23 years.

He’s also one of the nicest people you’ll meet, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to call him a friend; one who’s assisted me many times in my career. All that you need to know about Ernest in order to get along with him just fine is that he has no time or patience for people who are stupid or disrespectful – and that being one of the nicest people you’ll meet doesn’t mean he won’t be aggressive about subjects that anger him.

Ernest has written a column for Gamasutra since the place was founded over 14 years ago, with a largely free editorial hand. Unfortunately, that site chose not to publish this piece as it was written… something that makes me bite my tongue. Interestingly I went through a similar incident several months ago with my Culture Clash column for the IGDA. Perhaps wrongly, I elected to rewrite the piece to assuage the opinion of someone who frankly had no right to judge what I said.

Ernest chose another path, and here is his view, in his words, without dilution; because courage to stand up to wrongs (editorial and social) is another one of his qualities. 

— Steerpike

Since our tiny fists first clutched the Atari 2600 controller, we’ve been taught that story-driven games need to have stories – stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Maybe that was wrong all this time.

Video games are about imagination. They’re about going to places you might not otherwise go and doing things you might not otherwise do; they’re about meeting people and entities you might not otherwise meet and having experiences you might not otherwise have. The medium allows us, essentially, to take a life for a test drive. And the more advanced the technology gets, the less hard imagination work is required to “be” there. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, it’s just the way things are. But one thing’s remained the same since day one: there is always you, on the other end of the mouse or controller, always you separated from the other world by a screen. Video games can be about anything, but they always have you in common.

While I have never been what one might call an “intense” gamer, I have for years been a student of visual and printed forms of media.I have particularly followed the on-going argument related to computer gaming as art.I do this largely because it amuses me to find politicians who can barely spell “computer,” and lawyers who have an opinion about almost everything, expressing their remarkably intense and often nonsense-laden opinions.I truly believe they need to …

Sometimes the deepest ideas come from the shallowest places.