Boing Boing has an excellent essay by the Superbrothers about the strength and promise of gaming as a form of communication. They even take on the alphabet.
Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element — the brick, the turtle, the pipe — was a well-formed, understandable audiovisual videogame unit.
That’s the genius of this thing. It didn’t need to talk much at all, it was pure rock. This was the native language of videogames: synesthetic audiovisual expressing a meaning, where sound and image and logic come together and feel right, where the communication is nonverbal but nonetheless articulate, where you understand what’s going on the same way you ‘get’ the communication of a song, the same way you can be blown away by a painting or a piece of sculpture.
And here’s a link to the Gama Sutra interview with Jordan Mechner referenced in the beginning.
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