Kochi: If cinema is the aesthetic of looking and music the aesthetic of listening, then video games are the “aesthetic of thinking”, argued a gripping session at the Manorama Hortus festival on Sunday.

In a conversation that moved swiftly from the surreal to the geopolitical, journalist Rollo Romig and game designer and writer Dhruv Jani dismantled the popular perception of video games as mere entertainment. Speaking to a packed audience on the festival’s concluding day, the duo presented the medium as a sophisticated tool for exploring failure, complicity, and bureaucratic violence.

The session, titled ‘The Politics of Video Games’, opened with a haunting reading from the game, The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places. In the game, the player assumes the role of a ‘municipal building eater’, tasked with consuming government structures and monuments to erase history.

While the premise is surreal, the subtext is sharply political. Romig noted that the game serves as a commentary on the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the contemporary “bulldozing” of homes in North India.

“You are not just reading about someone doing the wrong thing; you are made to do the wrong thing in order to proceed,” Romig observed, describing his wife’s emotional reaction to the game. “This is really about complicity”, he said.

A recurring theme was the immaturity of the video game medium compared to film or literature. Romig argued that games are currently in their “silent movie era, a chaotic, experimental period before the “grammar” of the art form has calcified.

“Movies are kind of boring because the grammar is so firmly established. You know exactly what a movie is. But with games, nothing is settled. They are bizarre, surreal, and wild,” Romig said.

Jani agreed but cautioned against the industry's obsession with “visual realism at the exclusion of everything else.” He championed the “queer voices and indie developers" who treat games as private poetry, resisting the imperial frameworks of big-budget shooters.

The speakers argued that games are uniquely equipped to critique modern systems of power because they are systems. They cited Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, a game where the player acts as an immigration officer, as a prime example of an “ethical simulator.”

“You have to decide. Am I going to make this person suffer, or am I going to suffer by letting them in?” Romig said, highlighting how the game forces players to internalise the cruelty of borders and bureaucracy in a way a film never could.

The session also touched on deep history, with Jani revealing that the technology underpinning modern gaming traces back to Stephen Bishop, an enslaved explorer who mapped Mammoth Cave in the 1850s. His maps eventually data-fed the world's first text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure.

As the sun set over Subhash Park, the conversation turned toward the future of AI in gaming. Jani remained sceptical of the current wave of “slop” produced by Large Language Models, describing it as “stealing and repackaging” rather than true creation.

"We are volunteering for challenges we do not need to take,” Romig concluded, summing up the enduring appeal of the medium. "Games are the medium of failure. We go there to fail, over and over again, because we want to watch ourselves think,” he said.