The silliness of "hardcore"?

[Bodhesatva]

I certainly applaud game maker's attempts to create artistic games, but I tend to agree that they're going about it all wrong. As you point out, the games that most of us tend to play are heavely indebted to the sci-fi and fantasy realms that we geeks tend to delight in, which is almost always a very poor setting for serious artistic expression. Add to this the fact that most of these "serious" games tend to feature singular heroes with either genetically super or magical powers, and that these heroes often go on to save the world from the "Bad guys (however that may take shape in any given game), and you have the makings of an action movie a la the Matrix -- again, not a bad thing in itself at all, but more a work of stylized fiction than a serious art. 

I'm looking forward to trying Bioshock, as there is certainly a great deal of buzz at the moment suggesting that it may take an important step forward in artistic value for traditional games (that is, games where you blow up hundreds of bad guys). I'm still suspect, however, as I think many are still very peeved at Roger Ebert's recent dismissal of gaming as a serious art form.