Why Are There No Highbrow Video Games?

simoniker writes "In his latest 'Designer's Notebook' question, columnist Ernest Adams asks a very simple question: are video games' lack of cultural credibility partly due to the fact that "we don't have any highbrow games"? Titled 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?', Adams asks: 'Almost every other entertainment medium has an elite form... We produce light popular entertainment, and light popular entertainment is trivial, disposable, and therefore culturally insignificant, at least so far as podunk city councilors and ill-advised state legislators are concerned.' Do games have an image problem compared to other popular media, and how do we fix it?"

Comments

Easy

[The MAZZTer]

1. There are no publically available SDKs for video game consoles, so everything needs to be built from the ground up from machine code... machine code that has to be reverse engineered to figure out how to do stuff with.
2. There are plenty of such things available for PC.
3. More recently, game companies have been using more and more aggressive measures to lock out "unauthorized" (read: homebrew) software from their consoles. Think PSP firmware "upgrades".
4. Thankfully, PCs don't have most of these "features", and those that do exist (driver not signed warning dialogs) can be bypassed fairly easily.
5. You're not looking in the right spot, I've seen some stuff.

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