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Advice to the parent or significant other searching this holiday season for a copy of Rock Band or some other impossible-to-locate video game - you will fail. And chances are, you will fail spectacularly, but please, as you walk to the holiday gallows, understand that, as in all things, this too shall pass. The hot thing always does.

Now the bad news:

Innovation counts.

That's the lesson of 2007.

Unlike the cutting edge of visual art or film or dance, being a technology-driven art form, what is fresh and head-turning about video games often correlates with what's hot. Bold ideas tend to be better rewarded than bold marketing. For instance, about this time a year ago, last holiday season, if you play video games, sell video games, stand in line to buy hot video games for ungrateful children, watch your husband play video games like it's his second job, or just find yourself thinking about where video games are taking us, the die seemed cast, the players set.

Sony's PlayStation3 was worth a first born; the Nintendo Wii was hot but better for your mom than a serious gamer; and if the Xbox 360 was so cool, why could you easily find one in any store?

Well, not quite.

Turns out, unlike the other arts, the frame matters here - the PS3 became (at least for myself and many others) a $600 DVD player; the 360 reminded us that variety and a thoughtful interface is appreciated, and the Wii offered nothing less than a blueprint for the low-time-investment, high-fun future of video games. That was gaming in 2007. And it will be for years.

Indeed, Christmas 2006 proved such a turning point for video games and how we think of them, we can't consider the best of 2007 - or the year in gaming at all - without this glance back. Without the Wii to drag women into gaming and introduce us to that ubiquitous 2007 phrase "casual gaming," without Nintendo to remind us a game needn't be a lifestyle, the Walter-Mitty-meets-karaoke of Guitar Hero might not have become a phenomenon. The Xbox 360's Halo 3, unquestionably2007's blockbuster event (taking in $175 million in 72 hours), and a gamer's idea of comfort food, was also a reminder that game franchises are as beloved and durable as the big-screen kind.

And if you needed a villain, the media found one in the depraved brutality of Manhunt 2, which gave the gaming community a chuckle - paying $10 to be ripped off by a well-marketed SAW flick is one thing, but paying $60 for a lousy game, prurient or not, was never an option to start with. (It flopped, not because of sadism, but simple mediocrity.)

If nothing else, 2007 proved that we still don't know how to talk about video games, even as the medium and its core audience matures. But comic books have known about this for ages - what is considered kid stuff once will forever be understood as kid stuff, even when the audience is taking on a mortgage. The problem is that no one (no critic at least) has come along to explain the medium yet - what it means atheistically and how it's different than, say, the movies or the work of a video artist. Is it just a product or just an art, or the place where product and art intersect? What does it mean, for instance, that a new game like Assassin's Creed gives you an immersive, photorealistic triptych of 10th-century Damascus, but the game play itself feels lifeless?

I don't know.

But I know the new Simpsons Game turns some kind of corner. At one point, you become Marge and your goal is to successfully protest a violent video game discussed in The Simpsons Game.

So what does this mean for you, standing there with a list of presents to buy and a small outlay of cash? It means you will soon realize video games may be the only art where the best of the medium is also the most popular. Which will be cold comfort: It's been a good year for gaming, but at $60 a game, here's hoping that's too much of a good thing.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.

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