A lot of what you get out of a movie depends on what intention you bring to the viewing experience. You can go to a movie just as escapism — and be swept up by the visions and emotions, or whatever. Or you can attend a movie with a more expansionist mindset: you want to experience those same visions and emotions, but you’re doing it to connect those things to the rest of your life, to bring them back; not to escape from the rest of your life. The goal is, maybe, to expand yourself into perhaps a greater, more experienced person. Even just a little bit.

Dogs play-fight because it gives them the experience to fight more effectively when they need to really-fight. etc. So this isn’t some quirk of human-exclusive behavior I am talking about.

Games can provide this kind of mental, emotional and spiritual expansion, and they can push it in a different direction than movies, or books, or music, or whatever. In his new book "Persuasive Games," Ian Bogost coins the term “procedural rhetoric” to talk about one of the core qualities of games: that they communicate ideas via the way things work, through behavior. I think that is sort of the right idea, but I think the “rhetoric” part is somewhat the wrong idea. I think the richest things that games have to show us are sub-verbal, maybe even sub-intellectual.

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There are things you understand very well because you learned them via activities you do all the time. Let’s say, driving a car. (if you live in NY maybe you personally don’t drive much, but hey, most people do, so for the sake of argument). There’s a certain feel to what it’s like driving a car, how things accelerate and slow down, how that feels, how turning happens, what the higher-level flow is as traffic lights go green or red, etc. The activity of driving a car gives you a very intimate understanding of these things, in ways that are more accurate and deeper than we know how to do with words. I could write a whole novel full of words about what it feels like to drive a car with 10 years of experience, but those words wouldn't be very effective at really communicating what it’s like to someone who never did it. It’s just something you have to do. I am going to call this intimate state of familiarity driving-ness, and apply it to other things.

Games let us author experiences. I can give you a game about something in reality. Maybe it’s about driving a car, in which case you come to understand a little more about it than you would get from a book (though not necessarily as well in some areas as others; the video game would not be as good at communicating the feeling in your body of being accelerated). The driving-ness that you get from the game version of driving is different from the real version; but it is its own thing that is there. That’s what that game has to communicate to you.

Imagine a future where you have that driving-ness experience for a whole wealth of things--geopolitical negotiations, or marital infidelity and deceit, or calculus. And you didn’t get that by running a bunch of tedious programs in school, but rather, by engaging in activities created by skilled authors, that were compelling in their own right? If everyone had the same intimate understanding of propaganda dissemination as they do of the way buddy cops interact in buddy cop films, would we be at war in Iraq? Who would be President of the USA right now? etc.

This is part of the reason why I feel games can be important. Should be important.

Whether you check out this interview now, or print it out for later consumption, it is a must-read. 

*We kid, we kid.