I am deeply indebted to Madeleine M. Gross for her painstaking and thorough criticisms of this book. In many cases she invested greater efforts into her criticisms than I had put into my original thoughts. She strove to restrain my wild hyperbole and place my arguments on a firmer foundation of rigorous logic. The central premise of this book is that computer games constitute a new and as yet poorly developed art form that holds great promise for both designers and players. This premise may seem laughable or flippant.
Computer games are too trivial, too frivolous to be called art.
They are idle recreation at best. So says the skeptic. But we cannot relegate computer games to the cesspit of pop culture solely on the evidence of the current crop of games. The industry is too young and the situation is too dynamic for us to dismiss computer games so easily. We must consider the potential, not the actuality.