Perhaps I’m taking them too seriously, but I honestly, deeply, truly love this medium. I love games, I love what they are and what they can be. I’ve spent the last ten years making games based on the belief that games are art. I’ve tried letting go of games as a form of expression a million times, and I can’t, because it’s such a rich medium with so much potential, and because truly amazing works are created in it on a regular basis that inspire me and make me happy. So I cannot help but do as that last Blake quote says.

Error alert! Error alert! Sound the alarms! Run around in circles, spewing out screams of incoherent babble! Panic!

I don’t know what you mean. The politburo has not approved any errors.

One thing though, which I think is probably linked to the fact that they appear to be strossing somewhat, is that the paragraph with “No longer will you make us die just because we missed a jump” leads me to believe that they probably just aren’t that good at platformers, and maybe they’re not that good at video games in general, and that “figuring out what they didn’t like about games” mainly involved listing things they found difficult about the probably few games they’ve played.

As for the “weird kind of joy” that comes at “the end of the pain”, isn’t that just completing a difficult game? I played Mega Man 3 on an emulator recently and the second-to-last boss is massively difficult, but when I beat it and went on to beat the final boss (which is countless times easier) I was happy to be able to say that I managed it (with save states, admittedly). It was like I was caught in an awkward, almost-certain death situation, and coming out alive was a massive achievement. Obviously, in reality it’s a good thing to try to prevent those sorts of situations, but video games give the opportunity to emulate them with nothing resembling a real threat, and some people like that level of challenge. Clearly, these people don’t, and they appear to feel that video games that don’t have challenge don’t exist, meaning either they’re so bad at playing video games that they should probably just find something else to do, or they’re strossing.

Their problem isn’t with talent; it’s with theory. They’re the classic artists who can make art much better than they can talk about art. The more I read of their essays on games, the more I think they don’t understand intellectually the medium they seem to understand instinctively.