I have a good friend, a game designer of 20 years who often tells the anecdote, “I tell my mother I’m a crack dealer so she’ll understand because it seems so much more understandable and respectable than saying I make games for a living.” In a previous blog entry I stated the following: Computers have always been a part of my life. I've been working with gaming support sites for 7 years; I've been in the Games Press for five. My mom said to me, "now that you're into this, what will we have to talk about?" Apparently, I've mutated beyond human.

There’s a legitimacy issue in games.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re aware of it even if you’ve never voiced it to yourself. More than once you’ll have had to justify to someone why it’s important to you that you play a video game for your fun; why you’d rather not go outside on a nice sunny day but sit inside and get to the next level; that really, you’ve learned something from playing games as opposed to killing multiple brain cells.

Movies are a legitimate form of entertainment media. Television is a legitimate form of entertainment media. Books have always been a legitimate form of entertainment media.

Comic books are more than 60 years old. They are not.

But wait?! You can make a movie based on a graphic novel (admit it, it’s a big comic book) and it’s a legitimate form of entertainment media. The original media? Still not legitimate.

In the last three weeks I’ve attended four press events/conferences/seminars or had the opportunity to talk to game developers. And something struck me as odd: more than once they were asking creators of other media to approve their game design.

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