Games Are Humanity's Greatest Achievement
In Tyler Cowen's 2024 year-end retrospective, he argued games haven't produced anything "canonical," and that the medium struggles to generate shared narrative meaning. It's an elegant critique that completely misunderstands the medium. This misunderstanding makes Tyler a worse cultural critic and student of the world. What he misses is that games are the only medium that allows humanity to express its greatest and highest faculties: commerce, art, and science.
Cowen judges games as if they were films or novels, "...it's too context specific to the person playing it and doing it. It doesn't quite manage to generate narrative and vision in a way that is intersubjectively understandable", he says. But games are not omnidirectional art; they are bi-directional. In many ways, this is the defining feature of the medium. They complete themselves through the player(s). The right comparison isn't to art in the way he understands it, nor is it the only comparison.
They are the most comprehensive artistic medium we've ever built. Music, architecture, choreography, writing... converge within a system that responds to human interaction. Games are the first broadly accessible art form with over 1B MAU (?), in which the art changes when you touch it. That alone should place it on its own creative plane.
The medium has pushed commercial innovation further than most other industries. F2P, live-ops, MTX, experiments, virtual economies, and marketplaces... Every other industrial sector is a goddamn dinosaur relative to the last 10 years of games.
And then there's the science. I'm literally part of The Experimentation Group and only because David Nelson was crazy enough to work with Steve Levitt on crazy Candy Crush experiments. That became taking King's dead games, the ones they were no longer developing, and running crazy stuff on them. This is the stuff economists fantasize about, and games actually do. More practically, let's not forget gamers subsidized NVIDIA for decades and are largely responsible for America's lead in AI development.
One of the medium's most distinctive features is its pliability. There is no surface games haven't colonized: phones, TVs, watches, browsers, social feeds, even enterprise software (have you played Confluence Race yet?)... Any space that can host interaction becomes a colony. No other medium travels this well!
Cowen's critique isn't unusual and reflects a broader academic blind spot. Too many economists still treat games as toys, even the younger generation. These positions are outdated by at least a decade.
If our best thinkers still misunderstand games, it isn't because games are immature; it's a willful refusal to engage with them. Games are not behind other art forms. They have surpassed them. They are the clearest expression of human faculties because they encompass all of them and will continue to evolve alongside us.