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Revenge Of The Highbrow Games
simoniker writes "In the follow-up to last month's popular 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?' feature, The Designer's Notebook author Ernest Adams responds to the wealth of feedback submitted by further examining what a 'Highbrow Game' might be, and categorizing the potential audience for such a product." From the article: "Several people pointed out that much of what we see as high culture achieved that status because it's old. Longevity imbues a work of art with respectability regardless of its original purpose — and of course, time tends to weed out the inferior works. For every Mozart there are dozens of classical composers who went to their graves and are forgotten."
Chris Crawford tried for a "highbrow" commercial game with "Balance of Power" in 1984-1986, an "Un-war" game about thermonuclear cold (and hot) war. He wrote a book about it later, and this experience lead to the founding of the first (that I know of) newsletter for computer game designers, and then to the founding of the Computer Game Developer's Conference, still running today.