Let’s say we wanted to found a critical discipline around video games. Sure, there exist plenty of studies of games as digital mingling grounds and youth-corrupting influences, and there’s always game theory, but for our purposes we’d need to figure out a way of analyzing games as art. How would we do it?

We could come at it like literary scholars and focus on narrative, and it’s true that many games tout stories explicit or implied, but we’d be missing the forest for the trees. Video games are visual, aural, tactile, even kinetic. Some take the act of experience and make it collaborative. Upon finishing a novel, one doesn’t come away knowing what it’s like to hammer the F2 button while chastising one’s guildmates on TeamSpeak for pulling aggro when they shouldn’t. The sense of accomplishment inherent in a three-man, hour-long Onyxia kill can’t be found in, say, the works of Jane Austen (though you might feel similarly upon reading that final “Yes” of the behemoth Ulysses).

We could approach games from a film studies perspective, adding audio and visuals to our sphere of consideration, and we’d be closer to where we needed to be as video game critics. But we’d still be failing to consider one rather confounding, rather important element. As 2K developer Steve Gaynor explains, “The player is an agent of chaos, making the medium ill-equipped to convey a pre-authored narrative with anywhere near the effectiveness of books or film. Rather, a video game is a box of possibilities, and the best stories told are those that arise from the player expressing his own agency within a functional, believable gameworld.”

Well damn. How are we supposed to take the uncountable, self-determined stories of gamers into critical consideration? How can we account for video games even operating in such a way? The solutions we seek can only arise from discourse, so let’s talk about it.