Where are Video games now?

Surveying the landscape of video games as they currently stand, there are some great examples of how video games can be evocative, deconstructive, or offer politically complex scenarios.

One of the most popular games of 200 was Bioshock, a first-person shooter (FPS) called Bioshock, deconstructed the ideas of Ayn Rand. Player's traversed an underwater Art-Deco Dystopia, after Rand's patented objectivism, free-market philosophy had gone too far. It combined the superhero sensibilities of many FPS with a valid critique (if a bit late, dumping on Ayn Rand has been a fun liberal past time for years).

Popular games have for years now have gotten many gamers to admit to crying, as well as many other emotion that people feel when they grow attached to their favorite fictional characters. The similarities to people attachment to television is understandable. If people play a forty hour role playing game, that is forty hours with one character, more than some beloved television shows entire run encompasses.

And games that put the user in control of some ecological, political, or cultural disaster are often popping up.

But all these examples beg a question: To what degree is the medium of video games being taken advantage of? If we are to believe comic book legend Alan Moore, why wouldn't you want to work to innovate the medium you work with? All the examples provided above fit into previous genres established at least twenty years ago.

And while games have shown themselves capable of being self reflective of gamer trends, no real new genres have been invented. Devices like the Nintendo Wii and DS, as well as Microsoft's upcoming Project Natal, offer wholly new ways to control the video game. Freed from buttons, video games should be at a place of innovation. Instead, the Wii has been flooded by brand products with slapped on controls for their new device.

Game reviewers across the board rarely mention how the controller influences the game, and yet it is a unique relationship only video games have (besides volume control on televisions, I suppose). For a brief period, when the Wii first came out, the games were judged on those terms. But the dissonance from not letting go of the past and embracing a new design completely was met with poor reviews, and video game critiques have returned content analysis and reviews based on what qualifies as good game mechanics within the genre.