Video Games are Special

The video game is a recent invention, and as a medium it shows much potential. By combining the superior mechanical options inherent in computerized games with cinema-like multimedia effects, limited forms of artificial intelligence, and even some tactile components similar to toys, it has defined a new space for entertainment, which it has explored with a youthful, if at times cynically marketing-driven, vigor. By allowing the computer to act as a surrogate game master, a video game earns several advantages over a game not using a computer and a media interface:

• Interactions between game elements may be made much more complex without requiring tedious calculation from participants, enabling the use of intuitive yet mathematically or logically rigorous mechanical components such as physics.
  
• High- (or even low-)detail multimedia interfaces allow information to be conveyed to or withheld from the player in a greater variety of ways, often faster, subtler, and more satisfying.
• Rewards not related to the victory condition may be used to more strongly reinforce certain behaviors, or to create and incentivize experiences outside of game-oriented interaction.
• The narrative component of a game may use more sophisticated techniques to establish themes, which creates the possibility of subtler and more interesting narrative metaphors.
• Internet connectivity, possible only through a computer, magnifies the ease with which numerous players can be gathered and organized, and the flow of information between them manipulated.
  

The fact that video games are far and away the most versatile method for combining tenets of games with established concepts of entertainment means that they also have far and away the most potential for entertainment of any game medium. Limitations on the convenience of computer hardware are an obstacle that nothing short of the technological singularity can overcome, meaning that certain aesthetic, athletic, and social niches are inaccessible to video games. However, the space opened up by this technology is so vast that for the foreseeable future, virtually all of the richest and most inventive developments in games will appear in that form (even in spite of their makers' collective tendency to behave at times a bit too much like Hollywood for their own good).