While the Thanksgiving holiday in the US has interrupted some of the controversy around JFK Reloaded (on WCG: 1, 2), a Google News search today yields some 600 articles about the game worldwide. There is much still to be written formally about the game, and I plan to do so in the near future. For now, I want to talk a little about the implications of the term "game" in this controversy.

IGDA Director Jason Della Rocca rightly noted that the word itself had a central role in the surrounding uproar:

For some, the very use of the word "game" serves to trivialize the artifact's content. For many, games are not and can never enter more serious domains at all. The unfortunate comments on JFK Reloaded from ESA director Doug Lowenstein in the Washington Post only exacerbate the situation. Says Lowenstein,

Lowenstein's comments are understandable, or at least logically consistent; the ESA is funded by big videogame publishers who want public protection and representation. But Lowenstein's hubristic implication that the mainstream commercial industry is solely responsible for branding artifacts as "games" is nothing more than a red herring meant to draw the negative publicity about JFK Reloaded away from the mainstream game industry.

Certainly games like mine and Gonzalo's are quite different from JFK Reloaded. And I'm not particularly interested in relying on ontology (what is a game?) to clarify this issue. Still, as someone who has worked hard to give a voice to political and other serious games, I'm strongly opposed to the balkanization of the medium -- or the suggestion that we and other innovators should find some kind of strategic contentment in meaningless epithets like "interactive experience."

Instead, I am interested in expanding our understanding of the medium of videogames such that they can be "normally understood," to use Lowenstein's words, as something more than the particular kind of entertainment they currently represent. For the record, I have no problem with that kind of entertainment; but I also think the medium must do more to underscore the medium's power for social expression, both within and without the boundaries of the "mainstream." This is going to require more games, and more controversies, and more good game criticism. Clearly, we have a long road ahead of us.

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