Gaming is currently moving through the initial romantic stages of a renaissance with the American public. The Atari shirts have returned to MTV, the televisions shows about cheats and games are back, but alas, so are many of the annoyances that led to games fading from pop-culture after the initial blitz of arcades, Pac-Man and Mario in the home. The newly revisited courting might last, hopefully, if all parties take to games as an art, much like films and plays. The forbidden fruit for gaming has been respectability. It has long suffered the branding of being entertainment for kids or men that still dwell in their parents’ basement. There have been many attempts to alter this perception, in the past dew years CNN has devoted segment to games and PC magazines allots pages to games alongside tech news, but the real speed-bump has always been television and thus the shows devoted exclusively to games. The problem being; all shows related to gaming have an apparent lack of vocabulary to accompany the discussion of games. Host are always young and quirky, reviews are always a ‘sweet’ filled cholesterol of ‘dudes’ and other slang that renders the reviewers credibility to almost nil. These shows, all of them, quickly wear on an audience and insults the intelligence of the viewer; if it is geared towards teens, like for example the programming on G4, then it should be on ‘after school’ and on channels meant for kids (i.e. after the cartoons are over). The cutesy talk and askew camera shots all degrade, what could be, articulate conversations about the gaming medium. Another reason that the fruit remains out of the grasp of gaming is that the content and execution of many story lines and plots are very Schwarzenegger-esce. The focus of intrigue and articles remains focused on gun size and hero machismo, as opposed to the shots used in cut scenes and color pallets on costumes. As a visual medium it would be obvious that the concerns of the stage and film; exposition, content, staging and character development, would also be factors in game story telling, sadly they are not. Back-stories and character introductions tend to take place a few pages after the button schemes in the instruction booklets, this would be akin to having a playbill tell you that Hamlet is a little mad about his father being murdered. To put it bluntly, it is unacceptable and lazy. With few exceptions, story and escapism have taken a back seat to bigger guns and better death animations. Sadly this is not alarming to the industry; graphic improvements, dynamic gaming without limiting rails and sims tend to be the trend for the future. I, possibly alone, yearn for the return of scripts and stories. Two examples of this mess, one that did it right and one that did it wrong, are Metal Gear Solid for the original playstation and Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox. Meal Gear had depth and intrigue; the characters were more than bodies to shoot and hands to put guns in. The story had twists and the cut-scenes were rewarding to watch. On the other hand the newly released Ninja Gaiden has none of this. It works only because of its graphics, unfortunately the story can, and is, easily skipped. The characters, men with muscles and women with breasts, are exactly that and nothing more. If the video game industry wishes to mature into an art form and past the connotations of entertainment, much like films have, then the rules and aesthetics of films need to be at the very least paid heed too. Along with that, the mediums that pay tribute to games also need to apply some of these ideas. Following along with current thinking: if game reviewers wrote about films as they do games, well, Star Wars Episode One might have been the (to put it their way) sweetest film of all time, while Citizen Kane and Requiem For a Dream would have been gone straight to the bargain bin for having had bad guns and no hot chicks.

oh yea, rookie fumble. A beef in a bad format, my mistake.

Woo retro shirts!

Ok, you''re wearing the ATARI logo on your shirt. That just makes you an OLD loser.

Ugh I am so sick of people complaining about how games don''t have good plot.

1) There are games out there with good stories (one of my favorites is The Longest Journey, but I''m sure the OP has never played this). Yes, the ratio of games with good stories to games in general is probably like 1 to 10 or 1 to 20. But in comparison, look at all the crap that Hollywood puts out. I think if you took the ratio of movies with good stories, compared to every movie that has been put out, you would still only end up with a ratio of like 1 to 5.

It''s not fair that you''re picking Citizen Kane and Requiem for a Dream to compare to, because those are among the best films in 80 years of movie history. Big-budget games have been around for what, 5 years?

For point 2) I''m just going to quote Carmack: "A story in a game is like a story in a porn; it''s expected to be there, but it''s not important." If I want a quality story, I''ll watch a movie, if I want good gameplay, I''ll play a game.

Maybe we should be complaining that Hollywood movies all have horrible gameplay!

Double-return between paragraphs, it makes them easier on the eyes.

I agree with a lot of what you''re saying. It''s not a new thesis, and you are in good company, but video games aren''t alone in this. For a good explanation of a similar scenario, find "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. Comic books, like video games, have been trying to escape the confined of spandex outfits and colossal hooters and crappy dialogue. Even when they succeed, they are seen as cute anomalies. Maus, Our Cancer Year, and many other serious works in comic-book form ("graphic novels", I guess) have shaken this stereotype, but it remains strong.

Part of the reason it''s still a common view is the simple fact that 95% of comics is The Justice League or some similar content. Nothing against such works, of course, but their pre-eminence in the medium creates a strong public-perception link between the medium and the genre.

Comics, cartoon animation, video games, and within video games, cell-shading are all mediums that are strongly associated with juvenile content. Be honest, isn''t there just a little piece of you that thinks cell-shading is for little kids? The way most "hard-core" gamers feel when they look at The Wind Waker is the same way non-gamers feel when they look at video games: It''s vapid, childish entertainment, based on funny sound effects and bright colors.

People read comics because they like to see breasts and aren''t old enough to buy porn. I''ll tell you what, I used to read national geographic for the same reason, and only the extreme religious right thinks of NG as smut. Comics, video games, and other media can "grow up" in the eyes of consumers, but it''s a long uphill battle. I can remember when video games were only for nerds. Cool kids made fun of video game players, and games like Metal Gear and Zelda were on par with D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Now every drunken frat boy plays XBox while waiting for his bitches to come over, and rappers stack Playstations next to their home theater on "How I''m Livin''". I don''t know if that''s progress, but I''ll wait and see.

Games have been around for twenty years and budget has nothing to do with the quality of the story. Text based games on the apple IIE had great stories. My issue comes from the fact that many publishers don''t even try to put one in.

The Police Quest and Space Quests had stories and that was all they had to sell themselves on. That was when writing made a difference, now it is all guns and effects. I would compare it to the movies in the 80''s, when bigger = better.

The art and the camer shots that are now possible because of technology are not utilizes and it is a shame. So the argument about budget and time is not all that valid.

Yeah I think this is devolving into plain nostalgia.

If you want low-budget games with quality stories, people are making new ones all the time. You have to spend some effort to find these games, because they don''t make a lot of ads or generate a lot of hype, because they''re low-budget.

But if you''re only going to play the big-budget games, then you''re going to have to accept all the things that makes big-budget games sell (ie. boobs)