An appreciation of games that click back and change the gamers who love them

Don't worry, no Ouya games snuck into this discussion. (It just happens to have a timeless, sleek controller because famous designer Yves Bi(C)har came up with the concept.)

Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers by referencing plot points for The Dig, Mass Effect, and Pillars of Eternity.

Anybody with a passing familiarity with video games or those who play them knows that games are more than technology. But classifying games as simply some pop culture ephemera that typifies trends and norms also doesn't perfectly describe them. To really get to the essence of games and the narratives they create, you need to find folks like me-or, more precisely, me sitting at a computer at age eight. That kid, to poach unnecessarily from Deep Space Nine, is both "the dreamer and the dream."

To be less abstract, academic Walter Ong once wrote an essay titled "Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought," in which he argued that literacy was not a measure of intelligence, savvy, or know-how. Rather, Ong saw technology as something that restructures the brains of those who think with it, feel with it, and use it.

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