Passive experiences like books and movies can be fantastic. I could watch Ghibli films all day. But my true media passion is video games, and part of that comes from their interactivity. I’ve been a gamer for twenty-seven years; I owe my childhood to Nolan Bushnell and Shigeru Miyamoto. I’d suspect that I’ve pushed more buttons in my life than a stenographer does in an entire career. And each time I’ve done so, it has made something happen on the screen. That’s a magical moment, in 1984… when you press a shiny red button and some guy named Harry jumps to grab a swinging rope. To think about it now, I still find it amazing!

The film industry endures, as it always has since the late nineteenth century. Camera technology has certainly advanced, writing techniques have evolved, cinematography plays a larger artistic role. But as far as film has come, it’s still distinctly passive. The difference between Casablanca and Inception mirrors the difference between Pitfall and Mass Effect, but each medium provides distinct forms of effort by the participant.

I love Heavy Rain… it was both lauded and derided for its similar nature to film. There seem to be two camps; those who feel that games could benefit by being more like film, and those who do not. Heavy Rain borrows a lot of values from film, but I can still recognize it as a video game; it’s easy to tell, you know… because of all the interactivity.

I suspect what most people are trying to say is that games like Heavy Rain lend a level of sophistication to the medium because of the certain aspects of film that it borrows, such as writing, acting, story pacing, cinematography, et cetera. This is fine, but I take issue with the notion that games should be more like the medium of film. No, we already have movies. Yes, video games use many similar techniques these days, but so does a knife compared to a sword, however one is used in battle, and the other is used to slice hard boiled eggs for your chef salad.

Video games should never aspire to be more than video games. That doesn’t mean they can’t be great, that doesn’t mean they can’t be art, that doesn’t mean they can’t be sophisticated, or smart, or thought provoking. All it means is that developers should appreciate the unique and magical aspects of the medium that can’t be found anywhere else, then turn that appreciation into interactive worlds that we can visit and manipulate.