People who play games, and people whose loved ones play games, are the everyday priests of these conversations, perfectly placed to subvert not only what a game is but how we should respond to it. Unlike the habit of applying universal scores, assessing games by individual, local and community responses allows them to be something more than entertainment.
This makes video-game consumption more like mealtimes. Rather than playing in separate rooms, coming together to play, like eating together, changes them from the solitary consumption of food into a communal activity. We are nourished rather than just fed.
It’s this that inspired me to start my online community project. Over the last few years our performers, playwrights and song-writers have produced some of the most unusual responses to video-games. Here’s a sample; the full versions are also available.
I have been moved and privileged to work with these performers. I know it’s all a little self indulgent, but it’s the conversations that they create that make it all worth while. Hearing Rebecca Mayes sing about Halo 4, laughing with Adam Moran about Portal 2 and journeying into Chris Jarvis’ odd world of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and those games will never be the same again.
It makes it almost impossible to reduce them to pros and cons, and turns them from a mass media experience about violence and complexity into something local and niche. It connects games with human experience, so they become part of how we tell stories about our world.
This is my call to reboot the way we review and discuss video-games. Our current relationship with video-games isn’t sustainable – not for families, gamers or even the games industry. We need an everyday priesthood, people who have experienced the sustaining engagement of finding themselves in the flow of a video-game and use that to help us be more human.
We need to nurture perspectives that enable us to sustain ethical, social, psychological and spiritual conversations about the games we play. We need spaces that change video-games from a juvenile pursuit into something that adults enjoy and that parents can understand.
Learning to steward video-games in this way not only connects us to a huge pool of emerging stories, but it broadens our understanding of what it means to be human.
The TEDx talk was part of TEDxExeter.
The videogame songs, comedy and radioplays were part of a FGTV live performance.
