Ultimately what I find really sad is that, despite being on the forefront of its expression, he seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the exciting medium with which he gets to work. Videogames are far more stimulating and revolutionary than he apparently thinks they are, because, much as people like Moriarty might try to employ them, the traditional definitions of the artist/audience relationship no longer apply here. We operate in some nebulous spaces in the videogame world, with the lines between on-disc content, non-core DLC, advertising and critique, editorial and opinion, pre-ordering, previews, demos, add-ons and patches, all blurring dramatically. What constitutes a game itself mutates as we go along, and for Moriarty to presume some sanctimonious perspective upon what a game is, who precisely is the auteur of the enterprise, where the lines between text and audience can be drawn, and then declare that the player must simply shut up and accept what they are told, seems laughably presumptuous. Indeed, his perspective seems mired in insular, conventional thinking that is woefully outdated. Film, literature, music, and the visual arts might be forms of expression that are largely unidirectional in their communication: artist produces; audience receives. But that's no longer the paradigm for videogames. Players do not simply consume, they react. They adapt to the stimuli with which they are presented. The act of pressing a button to manipulate the text is symbolic of an exciting transgression of form that blows all previous rules of engagement away. In its simplest iteration: you see a turtle coming at you and you jump on it (then you use its emptied shell as some sick trophy-weapon to slingshot at its friends to massacre them too; really, how is this mass-murdering plumber allowed to walk free?) But on the larger scale: we interact with characters and engage in scripted scenarios; we walk around inside these artfully design spaces and evolve their narratives with our choices. The traditional divisions between text and audience are therefore inextricably blurred in videogames, and this is all the more evident when we see a text like Mass Effect that so openly seeks to dissolve this demarcation; indeed, developer catch-phrases like 'there is no canon' are specifically designed to only strengthen such investment, to engender interplay and ownership over the property. For a 'journalist' in the games media to arbitrarily deny such debate, to close it down with a cantankerous screed against audience dissatisfaction, seems alarmingly ill-informed. He's like some crazed museum curator, standing at the entry on a box shouting at the visitors: 'Don't look at the paintings! Don't think about the paintings! Just move along to the gift shop and buy some postcards!' Read on for part 3...