The Sandbox

You knew this post was coming, right? If there's one existential question both developers and players ask about games, it is, "Can a game can be considered Art?" The latest foray into this realm I've read is Ian Bogost's "Why We Need More Boring Games" on gamasutra.com. That article is also a – perhaps unknowing – member of a set that inspires one of my personal existential questions, namely, "Why do all 'Game as Art' conversations invoke Casablanca?"

I posted earlier about Games as Art, a perennial topic among developers and players of games. Of course I come down on the side of the fact that games can be capital-A Art, at their best: not because I'm an artist myself, and not because I develop games, but because I know a thing or two.

Roger Ebert says I'm wrong. Clive Barker says I'm right, but really, do I want to be on Clive Barker's team? Sigh.

As games and game tech get more sophisticated, developers and associations like the Serious Games Initiative are busy exploiting their real-world potential in training and education. Now come two interesting examples of how such training sometimes manifests offline.

A study released today suggests that the motion-sensing remote of the Nintendo Wii boosts the skills of surgical trainees. And this release on behalf of America's Army, the online game used as a military recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, tells the story of a gamer who reportedly applied the emergency medical skills from the game to saving a car accident victim. Overblown or a sign of the times? More here after the jump:

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.