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I'm as bored as everyone else is when it comes to the old games are like x debate. Games are like books or movies? Hmm. Games are like music? In some ways. Games are like poetry, games are like architecture - all of these connections are interesting and shed a certain light on a specific aspect of what games can be, but they aren't the whole story. How could they be? Games are like games, and the thrill of them is that no other category captures the same strange richness and blend of ideas.It's worth having had this discussion, I suspect, just to arrive at that notion: that games are their own thing. It feels a bit like the process new parents often go through in the early months of getting to know their baby: there's a bit of your dad in the way he chews, say, or she gets that temper from her uncle. Eventually - hopefully relatively quickly, in fact (and no pun intended) - you set the family tree to one side. The baby is its own thing, too. Its fate is to be unique, as the great Oliver Sacks has written. Its destiny is to be irreplaceable.
Even so, these conversations never entirely go away. They trail off, and can burst back to life at strange moments. A 6 year old will suddenly, and very briefly, look like a long-dead relative, when eating a sandwich perhaps, or getting annoyed about Frozen. Equally, every now and then it will occur to you that, whoa, there is another thing that games are a bit like.
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