Quick history lesson. As some of you may know, the 1970's gave us some of the most deep, evocative and overall incredible films. Films from "The Godfather" to "Jaws", from "Taxi Driver" to "Star Wars". Now, I don't know all that much about the history of film, (admittedly I'm getting a lot of this information from this video), but I can tell you that one of the major reasons for this is that the directors creating these incredible projects had all studied "Film Theory" when they were college. They didn't just study how to get the lighting to work for them, but also how the lighting added to the theme and feeling of the story itself. In other words they looked deeply at how the elements of film interacted with one another and a genuinely unique experience. The reason I bring this up is because the best way for video games to advance as an art form is for them to be studied, looked at and understood by academics as, if not art, at least as something with a theory to be studied and postulated about.
I'm sure that there are people out there who don't think this is a good idea, people who played "Braid" (the classic, oft cited "art game"), thought is was boring and went back to "Call of Duty 4". And to you I say, fear not: there will always be our FPSs. Studying something legitimately doesn't in any way take away from the fun that it holds. Studying the anti-corporate and messianic subtexts of "Robocop" doesn't make it any less of an awesome movie (trust me). And likewise, studying what makes Halo or Call of Duty tick doesn't make a day killing people on line any less enjoyable. It couldn't hurt either way. Nothing has ever benefitted from not being studied
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