Why Are There No Highbrow Video Games?

simoniker writes "In his latest 'Designer's Notebook' question, columnist Ernest Adams asks a very simple question: are video games' lack of cultural credibility partly due to the fact that "we don't have any highbrow games"? Titled 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?', Adams asks: 'Almost every other entertainment medium has an elite form... We produce light popular entertainment, and light popular entertainment is trivial, disposable, and therefore culturally insignificant, at least so far as podunk city councilors and ill-advised state legislators are concerned.' Do games have an image problem compared to other popular media, and how do we fix it?"

There are...

[Tanmi-Daiow]

I believe there are highbrow games out there. You just have to look. I am considering a high brow game to be one that is fun, deep and has the ability to move you. For Example, Call of Duty for PC. That game gave me goose bumps. It was immersive and deep. You couldn't just run in and kill everything, you had to hold back and fight like it actually was a war and not a deathmatch. Even multiplayer had this feel. You would be dead in an instant if you ran into a room with guns blazing. Also games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic would be in this category. It has a very epic feel too it and above all, it was supremely enjoyable to playthrough. These are highbrow games to me.

Re:Pointless article...

[cgreuter]

Classical music, perhaps the definitive example of "highbrow", was actually the pop music of the time; it enjoyed widespread popularity amoung all classes.

Not to dispute your original point, but this statement isn't true. Classical music (specifically, symphonic music and opera--the Classical era runs from 1812 to 1900-ish (IIRC, and I may not)) was generally funded by wealthy patrons (i.e. nobility) and performed for them and their guests. Common people's music was ditties that could be played by one or two musicians and sung along to. This is what we now call "folk music". The concept of "pop music" didn't really come about until the early twentieth century when it became possible to distribute recordings.

A better example would probably be literature. Shakespeare, for example, wrote plays that everyone could enjoy. He had dirty jokes for the aristocrats and flowerly language for the peasants.

Elite games

[paulxnuke]

The closest thing to an "elite" game I know of is interactive fiction (start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction [wikipedia.org] ). It has a small but passionate community that produces most of its own games, because, as you may have guessed, they don't sell well enough to be commercially viable, and community standards are too high for hack jobs.

Most IF'ers disdain any graphics, sound, etc: the sentiment has a religious as well as aesthetic side. This keeps production costs low but requires vastly greater quality (in terms of story, program stability) than most mass market games achieve (more than they could achieve, probably, by simply hiring programmers.) Passion is the basic qualification, before technical ability even matters.