About the only way we could define postmodernism is as something that "doesn't make sense". That's why the plot of MGS2 is indeed postmodern, because it doesn't make sense. And there's nothing wrong with that. It is delightfully nonsensical. That's what Tim was saying, and I couldn't agree more.
I mean -- what, are all those JRPG plots that
do make sense better?
But to get back to the issue of messages, me and Raphael (another god) are indeed not really disagreeing. If he wants to see messages in games that's fine and dandy -- I can also see messages, as I explained in the article, in every game ever made. Spacewar, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, GTA III.
So any way you look at it, I am right and everyone else is wrong. Either:
1. All games
do not have messages (icy: right, artfags: wrong)
or
2. All games
do have messages (icy:right, artfags: wrong)
Because what the artfags are telling you is that only SOME games have messages (ICO, Shadow of the Whatever, Rez, etc.), and only THEY are the ones who can discern them and tell you what they are! My God, what bullshit those people are spewing in order to obtain some measure of superiority over the rest of us!
But let's put the nonsense aside, and get back to the heart of the matter. The issue at stake is much more profound than even people like Tim Rogers can understand. It is the issue of the possibility of the existence of messages. And this issue has been resolved by Wittgenstein ages ago. I quote from my article again:
According to the formulation of logic that Wittgenstein bequeathed to us, "The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists -- and if it did exist, it would have no value." A message of course being something that has value, and the evaluation of messages being strictly the province of ethics -- with these two facts in mind we move on to Wittgenstein's next propositions:
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
So that's it. Messages -- i.e. ethics -- cannot be put into words. If you try to put them into words your words will be nonsense.
But to fully understand why this is so you need to understand the Tractatus, and to fully understand the Tractatus you need to spend years studying philosophy.
Which is why I am the only one writing about games who fully understands this stuff. Everyone else is just inhaling their own farts, and will continue to do so until the end of time.