Ah, these peaceful few days before the storm begins to rage again. On the day that you read this, the AC2 Insider Web site enjoys a moment of peace. Behind us is the rush of attention we got when we premiered the Web site, and it will be several weeks before we make our really big splash. That splash will get everyone so frothed up about AC2 that our booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) will require muscled mosh-pit bouncers to stop the shoving and crowd-surfing. But for now, peace. We float between the rapids and the waterfall. . . Ahh. . .

So, I figure this is the last chance for me to indulge in a topic dear to my heart but which also is not exactly a crowd-pleasing, edge-of-your-seat romp filled with sex and violence. . . or is it? Because sex and violence is very much a part of any new artistic medium. Hmm, maybe I can make this exciting after all. . . Essential to the sex-and-violence payoff is making your audience wait a bit for it, so let me lay out the topic: Why games (shorthand here for video and computer games) deserve consideration as an artistic medium, taking a place among motion pictures, music, and even drama and literature.

First of all, why care? Why not let the general public continue to regard games as trashy, slightly dangerous, brainless fodder for the immature and antisocial? For I am sorry to tell you that this is generally the case. I could point you to evidence of this, but it would only depress me. So let's talk about why you should care. For one thing, as a player of games, I would hope you feel insulted that your pastime rates just above cigarette smoking on the scale of social worthiness. For another, the low station of games makes them an ideal target of ignorant condemnation, limitation, and even censorship by the government and business, who do these things to placate the general public's ill-informed fear and loathing of games. Other artistic media enjoy less condemnation and limitation than games do, to a degree which, not coincidentally, is greatest for the media that got elevated to the status of “art” longest ago--drama and literature. Thankfully, it's becoming very uncommon for anyone in power to try and protect the public from dangerous books. Regrettably, however, this happens frequently with games. And if you think no harm could ever come of a little social scapegoating, check out the history of comic books. Finally, another good reason you should care about whether games deserve consideration as an artistic medium is that it will help game creators rise to the challenge of making better games: games which inspire, frighten, warn, convince, illustrate, question, and plea. Games which, like books and plays and movies and music, entertain you while also moving you emotionally to see the world in a new way. Discussing games in artistic terms will give the players, the critics, and the game creators the tools and methods to improve them.

Back to the sex and violence, in case I'm losing you. One of the most popular ways to dismiss games and fence them out of the art camp is to say something like, “Kill, kill, kill--that's all you do in these games. If something moves, shoot it.” Let's set aside the fact that some of the most popular computer games ever made involve little or no violence, while the most august of non-video games, chess, is nothing less than a brutal war with dozens of casualties. To be honest, many popular games have violence as their main driving action. However, this follows a pattern shown in the development of all forms of artistic media: in a medium's earliest stages of sophistication, violence is always used as a direct way to engage the emotions. Only when a medium matures can it lay off the cayenne pepper of violence and substitute the seasonings that are subtler in taste and harder to master. One of the first poem/songs? The Iliad. Nonstop killing, spears thrusting, kidneys flying. One of the first modern stories? Beowulf. Rampaging beasts, warriors for dinner, blood-soaked halls. One of Shakespeare's first plays? Titus Andronicus. Arms cut off, a tongue cut out, a mother being tricked into eating her children for goodness sake.

Sex follows the same pattern. It's easy to mock the breasts of Lara Croft, the skimpy armor of the EverQuest elfette, the panties of the Dead Or Alive fighters, or for that matter the hulking muscles of Duke Nukem. But as with violence, sex is a direct line to the heart of your audience, a line that other artistic media used plentifully while in the early stages of their development. One of the driving forces of the early printing press was pornography. Literature we now regard as masterworks, such as The Canterbury Tales and Romeo and Juliet, are rife with sexuality even by today's standards. Theatre, from Japanese Kabuki to Elizabethan plays, was long condemned as a vehicle of vice and relegated to the smutty parts of town.

But these artistic media grew in sophistication, and began to use the primal, easy enticements of sex and violence as merely seasoning, while providing a meal that sought to engage, move, and teach the audience. And this degree of sophistication again matches the amount of time that they have enjoyed their status as art, though progress can be rapid: Shakespeare went from Titus Andronicus to MacBeth in little more than a decade. Games show a similar progress. Half-Life weaves dialogue and intrigue into a classic run-and-shoot game, to its benefit. Baldur's Gate transcends the hack-and-slashers that sired it: it explores profound themes of the nature of evil and justice. The game Black and White unabashedly explores the consequences of good and evil actions.

This all begs the chicken-or-the-egg argument. Did those other media first mature enough to then deserve respect as art, or was it the respect that invited the media to mature? Like the chicken and the egg, I think neither really came first in the form we see today. These things drive each other. And since I cannot really make anyone respect games, I can just write this to encourage people to give games the benefit of the doubt, and look for the art in them. . . and then go back to doing my part to help make the games themselves more worthy of artistic regard.

So what the heck does all this have to do with AC2? Simply this: I want players of AC2 to challenge us to provide more than the basics of sex, violence, and phat loot. At the same time, I invite the players to see the art in AC2. It has a theme deeper than “kill everything and take its stuff.” It explores the consequences of power, scrutinizes the natures of evil, good, chaos, and order, and holds a mirror up to human nature as we witness the roles that we end up playing with one another. I hope you will find in AC2 some of the things that make for good art: foreshadowing, symbolism, irony, tragic flaw, and so on. But don't worry. We're not abandoning the simple pleasure of a bloody battle or underestimating the allure of raw beauty. Good art should give you all this and more.

So ends what I think will be my last chance to get all academic on you. At least now I can be sure that my B.A. in Drama has been put to good use. If you come on back next month, I promise to mention Shakespeare at least 50% less often.

--Matthew Ford