In his call for this month’s Round Table, Corvus Elrod asks whether games can teach the player anything, associating this question with snobbish criticisms of the medium as being artistically good for nothing. This hypothetical critic’s argument that edification is necessary to aesthetic seriousness is reinforced by the “serious games” movement, which often produces bludgeoningly enlightening pieces about the tradeoffs involved in World Problems.

But is edification a serious artistic goal? This is a careless assumption to begin with. The idea that art’s purpose is to explain complicated things certainly has historic associations with religious and political artwork. But moral and aesthetic weight don’t necessarily come from someone pushing a message, but from asking questions and challenging basic perceptions. The Impressionists painted the same scenes as everyone else. It was how they painted them that brought Modernism crashing down on the twentieth century. Real revolutionary artwork doesn’t explain the revolution, it formally embodies the revolution.

Even beyond general objections to edification, it hardly seems a good fit for videogames. True, developers in serious games have demonstrated gaming’s strength at explaining complex processes. Nonetheless, there’s something that doesn’t sit right about trying so hard to communicate through a medium that highly privileges individual experience. If you want to send a message, don’t let the recipient write it. My suspicion is that most games teach the player more about herself than anything else, and this introspective potential is a much more fruitful source of seriousness than edification could ever be.

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