The history of media begins at cave painting and ends at video games. Every media goes through a transformation from a highly skilled, specialized craft to a fully open form of expression available to everyone. Books were once locked up in the hands of scribes, video in the hands of filmmakers. Today, anyone can publish text in an instant with Twitter, or video in moments with the camera on their
smartphone and YouTube (or Instagram, Vine, Meerkat, etc.). Game, as a form of media, is still mostly locked up in the hands of the coders and digital artists known as “game developers.” These are the scribes of our time. We’re working to unlock game-based expression for everyone. Furthermore, we’re working to invent the “short form” of game as a storytelling medium. We’re moving game content creation from something that currently takes months and thousands of dollars (at the low end) to something that takes minutes and is mostly free. We may not have culturally recognized it yet, but game is the most powerful form of media that exists today. It provides its wielder with the means to invent mind-expanding, alternate realities and potent tools to reshape human behavior and alter our very selves. The late Terry Pratchett described fantasy as “an exercise bicycle for the mind.” Extending that analogy: game is the mind’s high-energy personal trainer. The world changed dramatically with the invention of the printing press. It changed again with the PC, and again with digital publishing, and again with Facebook, and again with Twitter. Each of these tools empowered new groups of people to reach broader audiences and tell their stories with new forms of media. Imagine what will happen when anyone can tell a story using game.
