A mother stood behind her young son in the computer store, her mouth hanging open. The bloody carnage on the screen was taking its toll. I guess she had never blasted her way through Quake, wiped out the wounded in Postal, or just plain kicked digital ass in Doom. Maybe it was the way the gore spurted or the bodies burst apart that got to her. She looked worse than her son's digital victims.

The kid, meanwhile, oblivious to her concern, used every weapon he could to shoot, chop, grind and puree his way to the next level.

"What do you think?" I said.

"I can't believe it! It's disgusting."

"Mom!" the kid said, distracted for a moment. "Come on!"

Shaking her head, she walked toward a quieter aisle, muttering about violence and video games.

I don't think of video games as spanning a spectrum from less to more violent but from simple to more complex. Video games are new literary genres, representations of reality rendered in an interactive medium. We're waiting for a Shakespeare to take that mayhem and use it to transcend the form.

Maybe that kid is one who will do it.

Start counting bodies in the great Shakespearean tragedies and you quickly run out of fingers and toes. Sword fights poking holes in people as if they're pincushions, death by poison, people gouging out their own eyes, husbands and wives murdered, suicide by drowning - how quickly the body count mounts. Add the history plays, with their vivid depictions of war and assassination, the murder of children, all that torture, and the blood runs deep.

Because Shakespeare wrote plays so relatively close to the invention of the printing press, the idea of plagiarism, with its attendant beliefs that an "author" owned his "work," something fixed in print, as tangible as a rock or bottle - that idea had not yet evolved. Shakespeare wrote when western civilization was becoming something else. Not every artist is blessed with living in such a rich transitional time, when everything is obviously morphing. But we are.

Shakespeare used stories that everybody knew. There were no lawsuits when plays were based on the same sources. They worked up the histories, myths and tales in different ways. Shakespeare simply used the material to create works of such complexity and depth that the meanings never cease. Each generation finds more to explore.

Motivation in a Shakespeare play is never just one thing. When someone acts, there are always multiple reasons. The Bard tried to do justice to a reality that is multi-valent, heterogeneous, complex.

I thought about that while reading of the commercial failure of a recent movie, "Primary Colors." There were lots of reasons for the thinly disguised story of our oversexed American President to fall flat, but among them was the simple fact that the movie was too intelligent. It depicts the best and the worst of American politics. It may be good filmmaking, said the Wall Street Journal, "but some in Hollywood believe that it may have made the protagonist too nuanced for a broad movie-going public."

Added director Alan Pakula, "Hamlet has never done across-the-board big business in small towns, that I know of."

But Shakespeare did make plenty of money in his day. He gave the groundlings in the cheap seats what they wanted - lots of violence, bawdy stories and sexual innuendo, jokes that would get you hauled into court these days - but he gave minds that thrived on richness and insight something too.

Shakespeare was no Puritan. He told us what he thought of Puritans in Twelfth Night, when Sir Toby Belch told the hypocrite Malvolio, "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" The Bard took his murderers and drunks as he found them, interlacing their words and actions in so many ways and on so many levels that those who liked action had plenty to relish while those who loved to explore more deeply never reached the end.

I talked to that kid after he racked up a big score. He loves Doom and Quake, but he also plays games like Ultima and Diablo, simulations like Civilization, space operas like Wing Commander, sci-fi noir like Blade Runner and Pandora's Box. He also liked You Don't Know Jack, the clever Jellyvision game that uses words the way the great Infocom games did, to create multi-dimensional worlds in which we quickly find ourselves immersed.

The forms and genres, the archetypal myths and quests are already there. It's not the violence that makes most video games something less than excellent art, but that the depth and complexity of character and conflict implicit in the genres has not yet been mined. The questing heroes of familiar narratives, adventuring into caves or forests or interplanetary space, have not yet morphed into Hamlets or Lears.

Chaucer too used stories that everybody knew but had the Canterbury pilgrims tell them, changing what and how they meant. Then he interlaced both stories and pilgrims in a new way, cross-referencing images in an intricately layered texture. Re-contextualization. That's the name of the game. Genius sees what everybody sees but sees it more deeply, in a different context. When we - playgoers and readers of old or game players of today - are drawn into the vision, the context of our own lives and understanding is transformed.

The enemy is not simulated violence. The enemy is a mentality that says art or entertainment - plays, films or video games - must be dumbed down to the lowest level. Give the groundlings their violence and sex (and admit that we're all groundlings to a degree) but let the games evolve in the hands of masters into interactive digital experience brimful of meaning and mystery. Let the genius-team bring insight and wit to the virtual gardens waiting to be watered with more than blood so they can bloom with thousands of imaginary flowers.

April 18 1998