I've had serious discussions in the past about whether nor not video games constitute an art form. I hold very strongly that they do--the act of playing a game can be as engrossing as the best novel, and the act of creating a game can be much more involved than the creation of a film. The video game industry has suprassed the film industry in monetary terms, and seems now to equal to television and cinema in regards to pop-cultural awareness.

There are, of course, detractors.

They're wrong.

Anyway, I've had this phrase in my head all year--"The year is 2008"--from the opening cinematic of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The game came out in 2001, and it struck me at the time that it's rare for a piece of art to predict so near a future.

We like to look at early science fiction and laugh: Bradbury's Martian Chronicles had us living on foreign planets by the 1990s, and of course Orwell envisioned the thought police and big brother by 1984. Here it is, coming up on a decade into the new millenium, and there are no flying cars, teleporters, or laser guns.

So I've been waiting seven years to see how ironic Ghost Recon would be. It's always struck me as a bit brazen to put a very specific timeline on a piece of art that takes place in the future, especially the near future, when people will be able to have immediate perspective on how wrong it is.

But it's not.