Video games need to evolve. I'm a gamer but lately I'm becoming more and more convinced that the gaming market is shallow and uncreative. I'm tired of it.

The main thing that I want to see phase out is the bondage video games have to the skill factor. I don't care about acquiring a skill. I don't care about being challenged. If in order to have fun I have to repeatedly push myself to get better at some task, then fuck it. When a game starts to feel more like work than play is when I put the controller down and do something else.
This is especially true (though not exclusively) for multiplayer games. If you take a step back and a good look, its utterly stupid and laughable how obsessed people can become at "being the best" at performing some random task. While it may feel good at first to "pwn noobs", you can't help but realize you're participating in nothing more than an endless e-penis measuring contest.

The fact is, our lower human emotions can turn anything into a contest, no matter how pointless, mundane, or stupid. To be the best at something for the sake of being the best at it is a shallow victory. It is very profitable to exploit these lower emotions because it causes gamers to come back and try their luck a second time, and keep coming back to maintain their topmost position, assuming they make it that far to begin with. This is "Behavioral Game Design", which is a fancy name for brainwashing players to keep coming back for more, without needing to provide more for them. (See: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featu.....ame_design.php)

I see games as an opportunity to explore other worlds, and participate in hypotheticals that would be impossible in the real world, through the eyes of someone or something other than myself. I want to experience the things I imagine when I close my eyes and daydream, or when I listen to an enchanting, spine-chilling passage of music. (Trance mostly.) I want to experience these things as though they were really, truly real. But, not even my wildest dreams involved anything along the lines of performing some repetitive mechanic in return for an output of precisely timed rewards, or winning some contest that I never knew even existed. I think the potential to experience the things we truly want to experience through this medium is being squandered in favor of cheaper, more profitable design strategies that exploit human nature. Again, I don't care about being challenged, acquiring some useless skill, performing tasks, or solving problems, especially when neither of these have any affect on the real world. While they can be supplementary to the experience of a "game" they are not the center of my interests, and be honest, neither are they for you.

The term "game" should change. Traditionally, video games were limited to competitive task performing - the figurative pulling of the lever in the skinner box (reference, see link above) - because of technological limitations, and the only alternative to that was a text-based adventure. The term game was reinforced and popularized, but now those technological limitations are no longer there.
When you think of the word "game" you usually think of forming strategies to reach a particular goal, under a certain set of rules, and I feel there is much more potential for variety of interactive experiences in store for us. Games should expand to "interactive media" to not only make room for alternatives to problem-solving based media but to redefine the games' image in the public eye as an art form and not toys for children.

I think reinventing games as a means of experiencing fantasy will also remove games' stupid dependence on violence to be entertaining, which will also be required if games are ever to be recognized as a true art form.