Vrav pointed me to Chris Crawford's "Dragon" speech a short while ago and, having watched it, I've been looking into Crawford's work, in particular his current "Storytron" project.
One thing that struck me is his declaration that games don't need to be fun: Crawford believes that trying to be fun hurts a game's potential to teach, to move the audience and otherwise to convey the author's ideas and feeling - while I agree with him on a frightening number of points I think he's missed the mark with this one, depending on exactly what he meant by fun.
You see, I believe that games are just like any other medium - they can be used to entertain, to educate and to influence in the same way as books or plays or films. However, in the same way as books or plays or films, they cannot do so without the audience's consent - you need to give them some reason to listen, so how you present is just as important as what you're presenting.
Let me give you an example: I have a lecturer at university who clearly knows his subject back to front but, unfortunately, he's a terrible speaker, dull as ditch water, and so it's literally impossible to stay focused for more than a couple of minutes before your mind starts to wander.
He has important information to convey, but he might as well have nothing to say at all because he's unable to engage the audience. Content without presentation is thus just as worthless as a presentation without content - a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
If you're a visually minded sort of person you can think of it as a sliding scale: on one end of the spectrum we have meaningless entertainment - pornography and shoot em' ups - while at the other end we have what could be called "elitist art", which has to be suffered to be enjoyed: One side has no message to spread and the other has no audience to hear its message.
Here's a graph I made - I make a lot of graphs:
My now dead grandfather's mantra was "moderation in all things" and I'm yet to find a situation where this doesn't apply - absolutes simply don't work because neither extreme is the "right answer"- it will always be the synthesis of the two that allows for progress. What I'm trying to say is: we should place ourselves in the middle of scale - be entertaining and yet still have some sort of message to convey. This is the basis of most comedians: in making fun of various issues they denounce, criticize and make suggestions - the humour is the sugar that makes the medicine go down, just as the fun in games is what could be used to make them a very powerful medium indeed.
I'm standing by my views that long posts are more readible if you boldify random part of them, and include breasts - anyway, below are a few links to widgets I've mentioned - what are your thoughts?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_04PLBdhqZ4&hl=fr
http://www.storytron.com
