Now you’re just being ridiculous. Of *course* the relative newness of games as a medium matters. Was “The Sneeze” an involving emotional experience? No. Were the Keystone Kops? No. Was *anything* in film worth discussing outside academia for the first thirty years of the medium? No.

How ’bout books? Well, it’s hard to say, because Shakespeare had thousands of years of written word to lean on before he came along.

Games are a totally new paradigm. Throughout their history so far, they’ve been like books, they’ve been like movies, and they’ve even been like comic books. And it’s not until Half Life came along that really showed what games could be like if they took their storytelling, and made it game-specific. And like Chaplin, very few people have been able to wrap their heads around what Valve is doing that makes their storytelling fundamental better than anyone else in the medium, currently.

But the issue here is one of maturity, and perception. Early on in the life of movies, the perception was that they were entertainment, not art. Something to keep the masses entertained for cheap. People didn’t believe they could convey emotional content, they didn’t believe that they could be involving and thoughtful. They thought that movies were a means of keeping the laborers from realizing how crap their lives were by providing a funny moving picture show.

The point is that games as a medium are so different, and have such vast potential, that very few people have even started to scratch the surface of what kinds of involvement a player can have with a game. The fact that most games are commercial exercises in finding the lowest common denominator doesn’t make the *medium* lesser.