There’s a moment in Tomb Raider when you sneak up on two men that are arguing with one another: One of them has just killed a fellow comrade because: “He wouldn’t shut the fuck up. It was driving me crazy. Sun Queen this, Sun Queen that. All that goddamned praying and chanting. I couldn’t take it.”

“You coulda just knocked him out,” says the still living comrade, and the murderer responds, “I lost my temper. The place brings it out in me.”

That’s about when the conversation ends, and I shoot them both in the head with an arrow. It’s an instinctive action at this point. I’ve been trained to kill Solari before they see me, life is just simpler that way, but those words stick with me for the rest of the game: “The place brings it out in me.”

The 2013 Game Developer’s Conference is in full swing today. Next to Triple-A Post-Mortems and panels featuring veteran designers and luminaries, indie game upstarts shout their own rants and creeds, joining a chorus of people all interested in one way or another in improving games. It saddens me then to not find the Serious Games Summit at this year’s proceedings. If anyone needs to find a place at the table, they are the designers and creators of impact games.

Call them what you want: serious games, political games, games for change, social impact games, whatever. I’m talking about games designed with the express purpose of illuminating, satirizing, changing, or otherwise commenting on real-world issues. Games for Change in New York is keeping up the good fight for designers of everything political, educational, and more, but despite their continued work, both in creating and advocating for impact games, the genre is still having trouble finding a home amongst our pop-culture family.

The biggest dilemma facing impact games today is the genre’s inability to transcend the perception of triviality. We are fools if we really believe games already won the “are they art?” debate. Art is an expansive term. It encompasses a whole array of subjects and subject matter, from hyper-real sculptures to still-photography or urban poverty. Just this week, Tilda Swinton took a nap in a glass box and the world of critical pop-culture was abuzz with both ridicule and appreciation.

Meanwhile, the Apple app store continues to vehemently curate impact games out of their market place. Of course I respect the independent corporation’s ability to manage their assets and brand, no matter how inanely I deem their curation policy. I also understand that iPhones and iPads do not define “accessibility” for the diverse audiences that impact games often seek to reach. That being said, whether we like it or not, Apple both shapes and reflects popular discourse about entertainment and its consumption. When Apple rejects games like Littleloud’s Sweatshop game because it dared to broach a touchy subject, we are losing the “are games art?” debate all over again.

Yes, even the MoMA has its limit; even museums turn away some artwork for being too controversial or ineffective. The problem isn’t that one game or two games have to find another home. It’s that they were turned away by a driving force in the mobile games space not for how they depict their art but for their very subject matter. Simon Parkin, esteemed journalist and Head of Games at Litteloud laments Apple’s decision himself in the Guardian, poignantly stating “the message is clear: certain topics are off-limits for games (although not, for example, killing and maiming other virtual characters as in so many games on App Store).”  To share with you Apple’s own wording, “if you want to criticize a religion, write a book.”

Apple is not the only one playing it safe with game subject matter. TVO, Ontario’s public broadcasting network, has pulled Pipeline Trouble from the app store after critics lambasted the game for portraying the bombing of pipelines. The game is actually a “companion” to the TVO funded documentary Trouble in the Peace, which investigates concerns about gas pipelines in Ontario, including six actual bombings that took place in 2008 and 2009.

Replicating real world concerns was deemed too much even though players in the game manage a pipeline and cannot bomb anything themselves, nor does the game mention any specific pipeline or condone such behavior. Pipeline Trouble tries, perhaps unsuccessfully, to create an educational system in which destructive behavior can result in destructive consequences.

It is a tragedy that games are deemed inherently too juvenile to broach serious real world subject matter. TVO willingly took a risk with Inside the Haiti Earthquake, another documentary companion piece that let players interact with and learn about aid relief in the devastating aftermath of the 2010 disaster. For those interested in realities on the ground, the game opened up some of the systems and dilemmas that slow, impede, and empower aid workers, journalists, and survivors.

Impact games, documentary games, games on any subject matter, can work if done right. We have to make them work. Otherwise, we miss out on an amazing opportunity to teach, subvert, and analyze valuable real world systems that affect the world.  Yet every time a game is pulled, ignored, or relegated not for how its constructed, but for what it dares to discuss, games as a whole take a huge step backwards.

Of course Apple, TVO, and any other distributors have the right to take down games they find unappealing. That’s fine. I just don’t want this occurrence to go unnoticed. The discourse still falls prominently in the camp that games about serious or real world issues can only offend when creating a sense of play. Despite the recent influx of meaningfully rich gaming experience, impact games still have not claimed their rightful place amongst other meaningful forms of art.

On the eve of the release of Bioshock Infinite, a friend of my daughter played the original Bioshock for the first time.  Neither she, nor my daughter, realized that Infinite‘s release was just around the corner.  They weren’t prepping for the upcoming release or anything like that.  They are both 18, and they just wanted to play a scary game (they have an affinity for the terrors of games like Slender and the creepiness of games like The Path).

My wife and my other two daughters were curled up on the couch watching the game.  I personally hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of the whole affair, as I was dealing with a laptop that had just suffered the blue screen of death and was kind of in and out as I cursed fate and tried to figure a way around it.

That is, until I heard everybody scream.

There is technically one more game of the type that have come to call the “First Person Walker” that I haven’t talked about here at PopMatters yet, The Stanley Parable. However, that game is getting an HD Steam release later this year with additional content that I’m inclined to wait for the finished version before discussing at length. But last year saw a sister genre arise, or as close to it as developers dared, that appears to be something like a “Third-Person Walker.” Namely, I’m thinking of games like Journey and Bientôt l’été.

The First Person Walker is defined by its reduction of all the interactive elements of games until the only major verbs that describe the actions in them are “looking” and “moving.” While I describe them as minimalist, both Journey and Bientôt l’été do not reduce themselves quite as far as the levels reached by Dear Esther, Proteus, or even Thirty Flights of Loving, a game that still has you pushing buttons, opening doors, and allows you to peel an orange. In fact, the rendering of a body on screen seems to force the game to give the player something else to do.

The combat in Crysis 3 is broken thanks to the Predator Bow. It’s a one-hit kill weapon with nearly unlimited ammo that you can shoot while camouflaged. This makes the whole game very easy, too easy for a $60 shooter. It doesn’t provide the expected level of challenge, and there’s no compelling story to make my quick progress worthwhile, yet Crysis 3 is still satisfying. I enjoy playing it, I get pleasure out of playing it, but not when I play it as a shooter. Crysis 3 is only good when I approach it as a stealth game.