There are a lot of parallels between video games and film. Film didn't go directly from Lumière and Edison to the golden-age cinemas with plush seating and res

There are a lot of parallels between video games and film. Film didn't go directly from Lumière and Edison to the golden-age cinemas with plush seating and respectable audiences. It didn't even go directly to the wooden-benched seats of the storefront nickelodeons. It started out as a working-class vaudeville attraction, frequently in the form of titillating peep-show reels. It was crass, crude, and utterly commercial. It deserved and received little in the way of respect as an art-form. Video games were similarly dismissed as culturally insignificant for a long time, although they pandered to a different audience: the young. Games of the 70's and 80's were almost exclusively targeted at the very young and can be thought of as video gaming's vaudeville peep-shows. As the children who played those games grew up, so too did the demand for slightly more grown-up, but not too grown-up, fare. Pac-Man and Q-Bert gave way to DOOM and Civilization. Video games became exceedingly violent, but in a crude and cartoonish manner that concerned few. Technology steadily improved and soon the violence was not so cartoonish. There were many other advances. Games, such as Half Life, brought seamless story telling into the genre. Games became more movie-like. However, the overwhelming majority of games, to this day, mimic only the worst kind of relentlessly violent action films. When sound was introduced to cinema it came with massive technical limitations. Cameras had to be mechanized to synch with sound recording, and the results were much larger and louder than hand-cranked cameras. These had to be wrapped in noise dampening materials so that sound could be recorded. The result was huge, cumbersome cameras. The audience's demand for sound meant that cinematic techniques that had been flourishing in silent cinema were set back decades until camera technology improved enough to compensate. Similarly, today's gamers demand realistic worlds with people in them, but video game technology is wholly inept at portraying most forms of human interaction. It has been easy to realistically murder someone with a gun for quite some time now, but has any game managed to simulate a simple, two-way, free-flowing human conversation yet? There is a huge, rich world of cinema beyond action films. Many will never feel the need to experience that greater world, but it is there. It allows us to see the world through strange and foreign viewpoints and learn more about the world around us. Video games, although their finances have outstripped cinema, remain inferior in this respect. Indie games are carving out a niche for themselves, but primarily by picking up where video gaming's vaudeville days left off once the realism became the craze. I feel that games, as an art-form, and gamers as an audience, will be seen as inferior, and perhaps rightly so, until realistic dramas, comedies, etc. become possible. There will always be big tent-pole action games, just as there are in cinema, but there must be more for gamers to be seen as more than blood-crazed teenagers.