Just like cinema and rock music in decades past, video games are coming into their own. Once considered a malaligned way for children to waste their time and rot their minds, games are now becoming recognized as an ascending art form - perhaps an art form that will define the recreational tastes of a generation. Gaming has become both a worldwide cultural phenomenon and one of the fastest growing industries in the entertainment business. Franchises like Mario, Final Fantasy, and Halo are played on every continent in dozens of languages, while countries around the globe are striving to grow their own local development companies, trying to catch up with the momentum of the Americans and the Japanese. In short, it is a good time to be a gamer; we are no longer relegated to darkened sealed rooms and outcast status, while at the same time there is a plethora of new titles released every month with numerous platforms to game on.

All this causes me to wonder, though - is that which is good for the business necessarily good for the art form? Is the mass popularity of games perhaps diluting those hard to define qualities that make a game great? Is it perhaps symptomatic that First Person Shooters, with their accessible graphics, Hollywood-level action, and repetitive twitch reflex gameplay, are the reigning genre? Who else misses Adventure games, with the emphasis on narrative, cerebral activity, and artistic presentation?