Carte blanche. It's something of a pipe dream in pop culture. Creators and audiences coexist in a complicated dance where the necessary evil of commercial constraints determines the music and choreography. Every flight of fancy or bit of outr? experimentalism needs to be greenlit at least twice -- once by the financiers, and again by the audience. And those endeavors can permanently knock a revered visionary off a pedestal if they flop badly enough.

Recently, the critics at A.V. Club picked creators that deserve a lifetime pass -- a get-out-of-hate card for their best work, no matter what their latter-day sins may be.

Strikingly, no videogame people got mentioned in the A.V. Club discussion. I'm not sure why that was, but it's hard to give out free passes to game creators because the finished product is usually the result of a team. Would the game industry be better served if developers became the faces of their respective organizations?

In doling out lifetime passes, I tried to consider how much a core sensibility comes through the creators' work. Take, for example, Team ICO. Whenever a Team ICO game comes out, it feels like it's stepped out of a fog-shrouded forest, a place of mystery with rules that'd seem familiar yet would be hard to obey. Led by Fumito Ueda, this development collective gets a lifetime pass for consistently marrying haunting, dreamlike atmospheres to elegant, stripped-down gameplay ideas. Ueda's called the philosophy that fuels the studio's classic work -- like its first game ICO, or the PlayStation 2 benchmark Shadow of the Colossus -- "design by subtraction." The emotional immediacy of Team ICO's efforts speaks to that. ICO and Colossus feel like they've had everything extraneous whittled away from them, leaving only the essentials. A stumble from Team ICO would still be more fascinating than AAA efforts from lots of other studios.

Before the next pass gets granted, a confession: I've not played any of the LucasArts games that Tim Schafer worked on, like Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. I did play Psychonauts, though, and feel like that game communicates much about Schafer's sensibilities. It's not just that Raz's adventures were very funny. Psychonauts also sketched out effective moments of poignancy and longing, and zeroed in on inventive ways of portraying and making interactive the weirdness inside all of our heads. That's a pretty heady Big Idea to latch onto, and Schafer and the folks at Double Fine made it work. But, back to the funny for a sec: Videogames try hard to be funny, but all too often overshoot or deliver gameplay that sours the jokes. Schafer's games have both passion and polish, and that's why I'll show up for whatever he does. That includes Br ütal Legend, even though I'm nowhere near the metalhead that Gus Mastrapa is.

Despite the fact that I've never "gotten" his signature limbless character Rayman, Michel Ancel's already earned my opening-weekend loyalty with Beyond Good and Evil. For me, it's the exemplar of great videogame storytelling. Beyond Good and Evil didn't need to break new ground with a whiz-bang play mechanic. It simply paced its plot carefully and unfurled a clever, well-matured world that teased the player with reasons and the means to explore it. It's clear that Ancel's strengths lie in his sense of aesthetics -- both in terms of individual characters and game worlds. My anticipation at seeing how his skills may have matured in the announced sequel to Beyond Good and Evil knows no bounds.

Does anyone mainline the childlike sense of play into videogames better that Shigeru Miyamoto? By now, it's a well-worn legend how his hobbies lead to games like Pikmin, Nintendogs and the beloved Legend of Zelda franchise. The amazing thing about Miyamoto's oeuvre is how you sense that you're feeling exactly what he wants you to feel. Even his missteps, like Wii Music, replicate a primal experience of discovery. Opening up Mario's world into three dimensions with Super Mario 64; gradually empowering Link over the course of each Zelda game; and the very notion of the Wii's gestural controls all seem to focus on telling the player, "Hey, look at what you can do now!" It's the soul of interactive entertainment, and Miyamoto seems better at drawing that out than any other mainstream creator.

I've gone on about Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his games before. No other games make me feel that my brain chemistry's being messed with more than Rez and Every Extend Extra. The synaesthetic effect of tightly binding visuals to sound and, in Rez's case, vibration seems easily explained -- but the actual feeling is intensely singular. I have copies of EEE and Lumines on me whenever I get on a plane, because they transport me to a trancelike state where cramped seating doesn't matter as much.

What's really rumbling underneath this discussion is the idea of auteurship. As audiences and critics, we're asked to co-sign the creativity and vision that various games dangle before us. To me, the game designers who manage the sleight of hand that lets specific themes and ideas bleed through collectively-crafted work should be granted a slew of chances to perform their magic again and again.