Rob Fahey has just posted a sobering piece about maturity in videogames that’s as critical as it is optimistic. 

Video games are a creative medium, and as such they intersect with many different fields of human experience – but they’re also still exploring the bounds and possibilities of technology and commerce, still developing a language of interaction which all too often knows how to punch but not how to caress. There are topics our medium doesn’t seem to be able to touch without causing harm, like a clumsy giant lifting a delicate piece of glassware. Race. Gender. Sexuality. Suffering. Love. Even violence, the lingua franca of so many games, is addressed with little delicacy. Games can let you laser the testicles off an alien at 500 paces, but reality is tougher; they fumble and fall when they try to deal with sexual violence, for example, or the grim horror of a massacre.

His ultimate message: Experiment. Not in the crude, pubescent way. We need games that allow us to “learn from each of them, discuss each of them” with sincerity. We couldn’t agree more.