Good friend of the Virtual Fools J (aka the letter J) forwared to me a link to a Rolling Stones article online that asks if Grand Theft Auto IV is the Best Popcorn Movie of the Summer?. I’m sure 5/8s of the population cried out “no, wait, that’s a game!!” before reading the article but the rest of us looked to see how author Peter Travers was going to draw parallels between the game and a movie. It’s a nice review of some of the narrative and plot and he purposely says that’s he’s not going to talk about gameplay. Fair enough. Good article. Moving on, right? Of course not.

What struck me was a comment left on the article:

Ben Raybuck | June 18, 2008 10:16 AM

Absolutely wonderful. It really is about time that someone with credibility helped to usher video games into the realm of high art from a critical standpoint, and I am certainly glad Mr. Travers is the one to do it.

Now, as somebody paying $20K a year to earn the right to call myself a Game Studies scholar with a little piece of paper declaring that I am indeed a Master of Science, this comment is a bit disheartening. After all, I’ve made it my goal to be one of the people that carries on the charge. As a matter of semantics, “carries on” implies that there are other people that have come before me and other people doing this right now. I’ve learned that there’s a surprisingly large contigent of people that are interested in game studies (which itself is a term that hasn’t been decided on). There is no single voice for the field, though Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT and Dr. Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech are at least prominent figures for the media. People keep expecting some sort of figure that will become the face critical game studies that launches the medium into the “mainstream” and “high art”.  They clamor for the “Lester Bangs of Video Games” without realizing that such a person isn’t all that important.

There are a lot of smart people thinking about video games. They’re in academia, design, criticism, marketing, and tons of other fields. Hell, there are even a lot of intelligent fans with good ideas about the medium. They all bring something good to the table. If we keep waiting for the person with the turkey, we’ll miss the people with the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the greenbean caserole, and the peas in a butter suace with those yummy little vidalia onions. Eventually the turkey will just arrive and we won’t even notice because we’re pigging out on so many delicious things. So just do your best with your side dish and remind other people that Peter Travers has the rolls.