“Japan used to define gaming,” said Jake Kazdal, a longtime developer who has worked at Sega in Tokyo and the American game publisher Electronic Arts. “But now many developers just do the same thing over and over again.”

Part of Japan’s problem, Mr. Kazdal said, is a growing gap in tastes between players there and overseas. The most popular games in Japan are linear, with little leeway for players to wander off a defined path. In the United States, he said, video games have become more open, virtual experiences.

“Smarter developers in Japan are trying to reach out to the West,” Mr. Kazdal said. “They’re collaborating and trying to make games that have more global appeal.”

– Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times.

Interesting read on how Japan has fallen behind the West in video-game design, which came as news to me.

And the point about more open, virtual experiences is an interesting one. Video games probably simulate reality better than any other artistic medium in that they provide the gamer some agency — limited by the world of the game, granted, and so not quite free will, but more control over the experience than is given to consumers of film or novels.

So it strikes me that as video games gain legitimacy as an art form — something that seems more or less inevitable — and a higher percentage of creative young minds begin dedicating themselves to game design, I imagine video games should present aesthetic experiences more thorough than those available in any earlier medium.

Does that make any sense? I guess I mean to say that, while a movie in which the protagonist makes a series of misguided choices that lead him down a desperate road to agony might be heartbreaking to watch, it seems like it would be exponentially more heartbreaking to be controlling the protagonist, making all those poor choices, and leading an avatar down that desperate road in the game world you control.

Of course, that’d make for a pretty crappy video game. And though I haven’t played many video games — especially of the non-sports variety — in years, it seems to me that they still lack the emotional timbre of good films and novels. So maybe it’s not to be.

Just thinking out loud I guess. I just really wanted a good excuse to mention an idea ex-roommate Mike and I came up with a while ago, I guess while we were hatching plans to design a video game or maybe just playing video games: The Mars Volta should score a video game. I think they’d be awesome at it, and that game would probably rule.