Games sit awkwardly among their media cousins. This is not news – gaming is the weird kid at school that stares down girls’ tops and sets fire to ants.  But it’s not just an odd relationship with the established arts that makes gaming difficult to deal with. Even those who’ve taken it upon themselves to ramble at length on the subject run into difficulty. Expressing precisely why a game is good or bad, or even if it counts as a game in the first place is presenting a fresh challenge for the media.

While all of the arts are subjective to varying degrees, the freedom that is granted in being handed the controls can result in wildly different experiences for each player. In all but the most linear and restrictive creations – in which debates about the definition of ‘game’ rear their heads – the player will be granted some measure of choice in pursuing their goal. Games can be picked up and put down at will, and trying to identify at which point you can be said to have ‘played the game’ is a problem in itself.

Ten pounds for a cinema ticket and popcorn will usually net you between two and three hours of film. When the credits roll you leave having successfully completed the business of cinema-going. On iTunes a song clocks in at about 70 pence and will run until the track’s end is marked by the absence of sound.  After shelling out between £30 and £60 for a triple-A game, however, it’s often hard to tell whether you’ll be engaged for a night or for a year.

The shorter story-driven games will flash by in a paltry six hours, but an open-world adventure will soak up over a hundred hours of your time. A Warcraft veteran, meanwhile, may have invested several hundred days in their favourite time sink.  And within all of these time frames each player will have made myriad subtle variations that differentiate his experience from that of others.

Adding to the confusion, the product that ends up on the shelves is rarely the finished game. To patch, bug fix and append new content (often for some extra cash) is a luxury peculiar to games, and the validity of the standard review has to be questioned when it can become out-dated two months down the line.

To lay responsibility for the continued growth of gaming solely at the feet of developers would be wildly unfair. As a new culture collides with Old Media, the collective press must adapt to convey the subtleties of an inherently interactive form. The weird kid’s okay when you get to know him.