“A realization is dawning that games can be much more than what they are now... They even have the potential to be meaningful in deep, fundamental ways.”You can try some of them for free, so you owe it to yourself to give them a shot. Like indie movies, they tend to have more ambiguity in purpose and focus on aesthetics.
I hope these guys succeed, because we can only play so many versions of Halo / C&C / AoE / Warhammer / Warcraft. Change way the people look, turn the castle into a spaceship, improve the design, but it's still the same game.
Yet, I'm not convinced that games will join books, movies, and music as high art. (Many argue that mass-appeal movies like The Transformers are no less an art form than other movies anyway.)
First, story lines and characters tend to be very shallow. The old dude in Up had more depth than any video game character I've seen. I'm not saying that, even when you're building your Civilization, there isn't a story being told. There is, and that history creates part of the fun of the game; it's just not a very complex story.
The bigger question is whether games should try to create meaning. They should definitely try to force people to imagine new things. Indie games do a good job of that. Whether or not that's meaningful from an emotional sense may be irrelevant.
In addition to imagination, games should try to involve more of our senses. The breakthrough of the Wii centers on the fact that it brought new senses into the experience. Dance Dance Revolution is really a game revolution that we should appreciate in awe.
Ultimately, the division between games and tools will increasingly blur. While "games" will continue to be a way to pass time, "tools" can make people's lives better, more efficient. What more meaning could there possibly be?
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