In the unlikeliest of places …
Well… I’m blowing into the cartridge slot and spamming the reset button here, trying to get some posts going. I’m working on a few things that I hope will materialize soon. Right now I just want to post a link to a year-old essay from the London Review of Books.
Why? It’s strange to say, but LRB writer John Lanchester has penned one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the current state of games as a medium. The piece is from early 2009 and most of the games cited are from 2007 or 2008, but because it takes a big-picture view of where things stand it’s still very relevant. There won’t be much here that gamers don’t know, or haven’t thought about, but it’s just so well-said that I want to share it. What I mainly love about it is that it’s written for a broad audience, but doesn’t dumb down the subject material one iota. That, in my opinion, is a difficult task but one more enthusiast writers should strive for.
Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It’s keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more. It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear.
It’s a long piece, but well worth the time.
