I put up a story on Slashdot yesterday that ended up getting a pretty brisk conversation started. Slate’s opinion piece on The Lameness of Warcraft generated over 250 comments, and bumped a sectional story to the mainpage. Good work me.

From the comments:

sheer genius by theStorminMormon (883615)

You’re a rat, and the game keeps sending you to look for bigger pellets.

People never tire of making that analogy, do they? But it’s probably about the most worthless analogy you could make. Reducing an activity to stimulus/response may seem clever, but the trouble is that it works for pretty much every human behavior imaginable. And it certainly works for every leisure activity.

The problem is that games are supposed to be fun. You’re going to have to work really hard to come up with an alternative criteria. And since fun is pretty subjective, there’s really not much room for criticism.

Art, literature, poetry, drama and film all have associate bodies of academic criticism and pop-derivatives. So there’s a semi-objective framework from which you can criticize these works even if they are popular. Everyone rushes out to see “Titanic”, but it still had some really, really lame dialog.

Unless you’re going to make a similar attack on gaming (e.g. lame dialog, bad graphics, etc.) it’s really hard to make any criticism that doesn’t reduce to petulant whining. There simple is no cohesive theory of gaming criticism (outside of technical elements), and so before you start slinging criticisms you need to build the framework. I don’t see that happening in this article.

So basically, it’s just whining.