...Or, Why I Think Interactivity is the Current Pinnacle of Media



My Father has a favorite story from my childhood. It has to do with me, at age four or five or so, the first time I saw an animated film. That film was Beauty and the Beast. He describes my face as my jaw went slack, my expression softened, and my eyes widened to an awed stare. My normally-jabbering mouth went silent, and my posture relaxed.

This was pure, childhood wonder. It was the utter immersion of myself into the world created by this medium, this animation, that I had never seen before. Or, as Dad would describe it, "he turned into a little zombie."

Today, I am considerably more responsive when viewing movies. Considerably more. As any of my girlfriends could tell you, I'm a sucker for an emotional movie, especially an animated one. I cried during Up. I shouted "No! when Wall-E was crushed. I wept outright when the Iron Giant sacrificed himself to save Hogarth and his town. This is coming from a guy in the middle of college.

However, though I allow myself to react emotionally to these films, I have never quite replicated how I responded to Beauty and the Beast as a small child. I do not stare, open-mouthed, utterly immersed, utterly fixated, part of the movie's world. Perhaps it has something to do with studying film, particularly animation. Perhaps I have merely become inured to the tropes of the medium. Or perhaps, and this is most likely, I merely grew up. Why I never became the "zombie" again does not particularly matter, so much as the mere fact that I did not react that way to another medium since.

Or, until recently.

Around the turn of the decade (oooh, it sounds so fancy when I put it that way!) my Father was bringing an old friend of his, Bill, to stay with the family for a while. Bill is an aging, gay classics professor with tenure at a well-known New York liberal arts college, and can be quite interesting to talk to, so I decided to meet up with him briefly on my way back to campus for the Winter quarter. After pleasantries, he explained to me that the current subject of his interest (though this changes often) was transhumanism, the movement and philosophy of "elevating" humanity above its current biological status through scientific and robotics advancements. Now, those of us familiar with a certain legendary series starring a certain crowbar-wielding theoretical physicist should be entirely familiar with this concept. So, naturally, I just had to boot up the "Welcome to City 17" chapter just to demonstrate to Bill how video games, a medium that he, and most other people of his age, deign to touch, could so wonderfully illustrate his concept (albeit in a rather sinister manner). He loved it. Moreover, I loved introducing him to it.

It was somewhere around the "You, Citizen, pick up that can," moment when Dad noted, "I haven't seen that look on you for a long time. Like a zombie."

Yes, I was again slack-jawed, open-eyed, and transfixed. Which, I have come to realize since then, is a common expression of mine when I happen to be playing especially excellent games.

Why is this? A critic could easily make the claim that "games/movies/animation/whatever it is kids do these days rot the brain," but obviously this is not a sentiment that I share so I won't mention it beyond the first half of this very sentence. Instead, I believe that it represents my level of immersion in games, as compared to movies, which I could almost describe as an inferior medium without irony if it weren't for the fact that most games still stick to the trite space-marines-and-tits format. To put things frankly, by letting us participate, games draw us into their world, instilling in us the same awe that we found when first introduced to the mere concept of an imaginative virtual medium (for the plebs and non-pretentious: animation) at a young age. Do I want to explore the ramifications of this? Not especially. One could argue, given my hypothesis that a game is by its very nature more immersive than a comparable movie, a child raised on video games would be inured to them, or that one might become more complacent with violence. I'm not here to predict or judge. I'm here to observe and to muse.

And, for now, I'm content to say that there simply is no medium as purely immersive and imaginative as video games. I know that this isn't an especially revolutionary or mind-blowing opinion here at Destructoid, and if you want to call me out on that, then you can blow me. I felt the urge to say it, so let me say it.

PS: I wrote this on about 3 hours of sleep, so forgive me if it's scattered.

PPS: Dtoid really needs a facebook-style status thing so that I can mention how psyched I am that Garrus is in Mass Effect 2 without writing a whole blog post about it.