Eventually I have to face the prospect of creating my magnum opus. "What it is" turns out to be a much harder question to answer than "what it's about".

For a long time I imagined it to be a book, a graphic novel or even a movie. I now realize that's a limiting presumption that guarantees obscurity.

I was drawn to those mediums without criticality for several reasons. For a start, I grew up with them, taste for words/comics/films are well-developed. Secondly it's possible to produce them at a low cost, maybe even solo. But most of all the skills to make them are easier to acquire now. In other words I know I can do it if I'm willing to take the pain.

Those are precisely the wrong reasons to pursue something.

Category-defining works of art were all high-cost productions, even if they are eventually democratized. It is when everybody gets to make them (even at superior quality) that it loses relevance.

Consider what people think of as a novel: War and Peace. We look at them like machine generated words now. But when Tolstoy wrote it then, think of about the amount of effort to pull it off. Not just for the fact that he had to hand-write (or type, I don't really know) that volume of words, but to keep track of his entire universe with just pen and paper.

That's only the absolute effort. There is also the relative effort, the kind that allows give him the above average skill that most people do not possess. It's called literacy, something that probably came with parental privilege back then. Therefore the amount of people who are capable of producing War and Peace then were limited to only a handful, and Tolstoy was willing to take the pain.

For those reasons there will never be another War and Peace, even if you can write a superior novel. Because (and they won't tell you that) everybody can make one now.

Now extend the same argument to every art form ever invented.

Consider the societal cost we took to build literacy to the point of ubiquitous social media. That was quite a feat, just saying.

Which brings me to one medium that's still costly to produce: games.

Costly not just in the sense of pretty-looking game assets (though it can be) but the literacy it takes to design something that's easy to learn but hard to master. Wordle was a successful case of design difficulty.

So if I were to consider game-making as my medium of choice, can games work as literature? Can I use games to express what I typically do in short stories?

This has been brewing in my mind for a week. The answer I'm afraid is a soft-no. At least not without making it a bad game that tries to be something it should not.

From this point on it's all poorly formed thoughts about game as a medium. But I highly suspect it'll lead to a breakthrough of some kind. I made up some questions I find rather intriguing.

What about games as tools for thought? This may not stick, this is usually the domain for words. Thoughts are captured in words, this is well established over centuries. Games may contain thoughts, but they are at the core about series of interesting choices.

What about games as tools for epiphanies? That feels more feasible. By taking actions in a game, some ideas get digested for readily than reading. Self-earned knowledge is more valuable after all. I don't know how it can manifest but it's a worthy pursuit.

How about games as thought experiments? Thought experiment is a primary tool for philosophical studies. It hasn't been done much in the mainstream since Star Trek: The Next Generation. What if games are the way to create generate more thought experiments?