(mashedmarket)

From Iroquois Plisken’s “There’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate” post on his Versus CluClu Land blog:

We’re often tempted to think of game design as an art, but it is more fundamentally a craft: games have to function correctly before they can do anything else. They have to be things we can use without frustration.

In essence, Pliskin is asserting that video game design is a type of visual art evaluated first and foremost on usability. I wholeheartedly agree. And perhaps some of the most exquisitely designed games are, more than that, a sort of digital folk art: they are products of skill and insight rooted in a particular subculture’s social values and traditional practices. 

Of course, that isn’t ALL they are, or all they can be…