As to the debate about the aesthetics of video games, I am finding it interesting that there are so many people compelled to attempt to exclude video games when it would be simpler to ignore the question. But for the current generation, there is no question that the greatest video games are indeed art.
I am in a generation where perhaps half of my peers have never played with a console or a desktop. For me and my closes peers, art has been something which elicits a feeling, as one 'experiences' art. Kitch is not art because it is so easily dismissed.
But art takes skill. In reading it is skill in pacing an word choice that involve the reader; in cinema it takes evocative lighting and framing to get rapt aattention. However, video games have had a simple method by which they can achieve the experiential involvement: first person perspective and control. This has lead to a raft of games which are designed fulfill every juvenile fantasy at the click of a button. However, one of the first uses of cinema was blue video and the Canterbury Tales are not high brow discussions of theology; as a medium video games will mature like any other new technology aimed we use to study our world.
I thought this article was great. The topic was interesting and while the treatment may have been a little light, I think that was the point. The author's literary style had the curved teeth of some of the most gripping New Yorker pieces. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree but it was a pleasure to read.
that was long, even for my tastes. I came away not really knowing what his point was at the end. I started skimming about 3/4 of the way down. I got the comparison to the russian revolution, and the web's effect on the NYT. But what of it?
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic that "the treatment may have been a little light". Maybe I just slept too little last night.
> What happened? One standard answer is that advertisers overpaid for ad placement in the past, and now the Gray Lady, confronted with precise readership metrics, is finally getting paid the pittance she always deserved. This seems implausible: could perpetually rationalizing, efficiency-maximizing capitalism really have misjudged the efficacy of print advertising for more than a century?
> Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s sometimes tactless data mining of your emails: write a friend that your cat has died and you learn, cruelly, of discounts on litter.
> And it’s often proposed that the dignity of games therefore lies in their future utility: play Doom now so you can pilot a Predator drone later, or learn to reduce your workforce with a click of a mouse. But the most potent allure of games surely lies in their fantasized, not their realistic, relationship to work. Here, control is angstless, effortless, and enormous: you can watch rioters take to the streets of your Roman city for two minutes of gametime, send out the police, cut taxes, shelter the rich, and watch your city blossom with gentrified villas some five minutes later. There is no game, at least not yet, in which you accomplish the mission only to learn you’ve been torturing an innocent man, or get passed over for promotion. Neither is your guitar heroism cut short by an overdose of heroin or rooted in coping with your abusive father. Here is a very un-labor-force-like experience of meaningful activity.
I think the comparison of the internet with Stalinism and even echoes of Fascism ("The first [they] came for were the travel agents") is more than a little hyperbolic.
The article is drenched in a nostalgia for a time when the public shut up and consumed their ad-laden print produced by elite institutions like good little consumers. After all, "for all its defects, [the NYT] was the best and most comprehensive [...] in the world".
The power of newspapers, and media more generally, lay in their concentration of power, the fact of their placement in society acting as a consciousness and conscience for a nation. The agenda for public debate is set by the media; politicians and leaders feel public pressure primarily through the media. But as we all know, the fact of the concentration wasn't a function of their power, their placement or their importance; it was a function of the large capital costs of printing. With publishing so cheap, there's no need for such centralization.
The question that remains is whether this new world is genuinely at a loss for new kinds of organs that serve the same kinds of public function. That e.g. newspapers specifically fail to adapt, or become uneconomical, is unimportant, I think. What's important is that there is debate, that insightful authors get an audience, and that this process is public enough that politicians and other leaders are aware of the resulting public pressure.
And for this, I'd like to look at a microcosm of debate and test its health, and then contrast that with the larger public sphere. Consider tech and software development. Hacker News is one of our highest quality aggregators, but this forum is first for centralizing and popularizing links to other articles we believe to be insightful - and those articles are quite often on individually run and published blogs; and secondarily, there is some trivial debate and discussion here. But the best responses are in turn further articles and blog posts. I think the iterative churn of point and counter-point that I see pop up on HN is pretty healthy. I also think it's much better than it ever was when people had to rely on the likes of Dr Dobbs to track debate and trends. I think developers today are better informed and more involved with the debate that controls the direction of our industry than at any time previously.
So this microcosm is why I believe public policy debate is not really at risk from the death of newspapers, and the way other media dilute themselves with soft entertainment news and gossip. I think public policy debate in more niche areas like economic policy, foreign affairs, health, education etc. are more vibrant now because they don't need to rely on amortizing large capital costs. And I think the kind of "hub and spoke" system of aggregators as "insight filters" with substantive articles at the end of links is actually superior to the alternative, where you have regular columnists on a payroll who may be more or less insightful on their daily or weekly writing schedule.
As to the stuff about art, games, etc. in the article, I think it's largely tosh and not very relevant. "High art" is what it is primarily because of its use as social markers, tokens and objects that signal status; moreover, art works best when it appeals both to our most base and visceral instincts at the same time as engaging our highest faculties. But for art to do this successfully, it needs a high degree of maturity, which takes time in terms of technology, practitioners and audience. Art is to rational debate as metaphor is to argument. The more able games are to create metaphor with parallels in the important things in our lives, the closer to good art they'll be. But I think they're art none the less; even Dostoyevsky (the last quote, which if I recall correctly is from a translation of Crime and Punishment) wasn't a particularly good writer.
n+1 is a great and constantly improving magazine. They just launched their new website and have a lot of good articles in their archives. The before/after of their old site and new site is amazing:
http://suyashs.com/the-new-n1-site-has-launched
I am in a generation where perhaps half of my peers have never played with a console or a desktop. For me and my closes peers, art has been something which elicits a feeling, as one 'experiences' art. Kitch is not art because it is so easily dismissed.
But art takes skill. In reading it is skill in pacing an word choice that involve the reader; in cinema it takes evocative lighting and framing to get rapt aattention. However, video games have had a simple method by which they can achieve the experiential involvement: first person perspective and control. This has lead to a raft of games which are designed fulfill every juvenile fantasy at the click of a button. However, one of the first uses of cinema was blue video and the Canterbury Tales are not high brow discussions of theology; as a medium video games will mature like any other new technology aimed we use to study our world.