Think of any media form – say writing, photography or film. Now think of all of the things you can imagine doing with it. I like to think of this as the “possibility space” – a spectrum running between so-called high art at one end, to tools at the other.

High art doesn’t have to be hoity-toity snobbery, and it can function inside or outside commercial enterprise. This end of the spectrum focuses on explorations of what it means to be human: it’s the domain of film auteur Whit Stillman, photographic legend Henri Cartier-Bresson and expressionist poet Georg Trakl.

Tools, on the other hand, get things done. They are instruments designed for specific purposes. My favorite example use of a tool is for airline safety. What could be more practical and less expressive than airline safety? But yet any medium can convey it: written prose, the spoken word, images, overhead films.

Most mature media â?? writing, photography, film â?? have explored the possibility space of expression from end to end. A photograph can capture the aleatory chaos of modern urban life, or it can document the atrocities of war, or it can advertise a product for sale, or it can help us remember what size lug nut to fetch from the hardware store.

Right now, videogames explore just a small fragment of this expressive possibility space. We use them for leisureâ??a particular kind of leisureâ??and not much else. But for videogames to grow in audience, reputation, impact and cultural relevance, they would do well to explore as many expressive avenues as broadly and deeply as possible. Some would argue that videogames still haven’t produced their Citizen Kaneâ?¦ but neither have they fashioned their equivalent of the airline safety video.

In my own videogame design and criticism, I’ve been primarily interested in games as political speech. Games are an excellent medium for exploring complex problems like healthcare or war or taxation, and can manage it in a way that does such issues justice. It is also a great way to live in someone else’s shoesâ??the store worker just as much as the space marine.

These are just two ways to expand the explored possibility space of videogames. There are many others. Advertising, exercise, and cooking are areas that commercial games have taken an interest in recently.

One surefire way of undermining videogames’ potential is to understand them only as entertainment. Making and using videogames beyond leisure doesn’t mean that the medium must either be an entertainment practice or something opposed to entertainment.

Some proponents and detractors of so-called “serious games” advance such a binary viewpoint. Instead, treating videogames as a real medium means imagining, supporting, and creating new games with new uses.

Doing so advances not only that one use of a videogame, but videogames as a whole: by filling out the spectrum of videogame expression with one new color, the whole of videogames benefit.

published August 8, 2007