Penn Jillette: With game design, “the challenge is precisely the same as magic”
Jillette defended games, and indeed all art, as a way to "deal with horrific ideas in a place that's utterly safe." Where detractors see these kinds of fantasies as celebrations of death and pain, Jillette sees a celebration of youth, life, and health. This kind of safe play is a way of gaining the illusion of control over the worst parts of life.
"One of the things video games do is allow a playfulness of fear and aggression, to explore in that space and be comfortable without anyone getting hurt," he said. "Certain horrors in our world we can't defeat. Death is certain. Pain is certain. Suffering is certain. We can't fight that in the real world, and yet in art we can." Controlling fear of those certainties through any kind of art is "the strongest 'fuck you' to death and suffering we're able to give."
Jillette said he wasn't very immersed in the video game world until his friend Mike Nesmith, of Monkees fame, sat him down and showed him how games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft were now serving the old role of rock and roll. Nesmith saw this as a shared space where youth can gather and coalesce around art in ways previous generations can't fully understand. While rock and roll has been largely co-opted by "the powers that be," Jillette said, games are now serving the same purpose of generational revolution.
"If you liked rock and roll in 1971, you need to love video games right now," he said. "It is the same thing. It is where our culture is; it's what's important. That's why I'm sitting here. I want to be in the band now."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/what-video-game-designers-can-learn-from-stage-magicians/