jchastain:

ok rebloggable version

http://uglysowwithhumanface.tumblr.com/ ask

do you believe it is possible for someone who did not play video games as a child - that is, someone completely unaffected by nostalgia - to become interested in/appreciate in-depth discussion and criticism of games and their aesthetics? for instance, take a hypothetical fifty- or sixty-year-old who is interested in postmodernism and is therefore used to appreciating hostility and bizarreness in art, but knows nothing about games. how would they be inducted into the, uh, “scene”, as it were?

Show them something that doesn’t have to be played for 50 hours before it turns interesting. A major reason people find games alienating is the absurd way they consume time. I have been obsessed with games for decades and I will be very honest: 50 hours spent reading amazing books or watching amazing films kick the fucking shit out of 50 hours spent playing any single game.

We have a problem, which is not admitting the degree to which we rely on games for anesthesia. They’re disposable alternate lives that slowly devour our real ones. “Gamers” are junkies, games are their junk, and there’s a kind of game criticism that’s primary function is enabling them to deny that. When we don’t ask more from games, it’s because we don’t want them to get better. We’re afraid of the world and we’d rather explore the boundaries of these fake, facile ones. We hate ourselves and we hate our bodies and we’d rather inhabit fake selves, fake bodies. We’re used to this being a lifelong habit. We take it for granted that we’re going to spend a thousand hours slumped in front of a screen, doing the same little actions again and again. People have made interesting things happen within that context, but so what? Try to communicate them to anyone who isn’t already hooked. “Slump here for a thousand hours and something cool will happen.” “Stare at this rock until the face of God appears.”

If we gain anything from playing games nonstop for the last XX years, it’ll be through thinking about them now, finding what’s good in them, and dragging the good out of the life-devouring structures in which it is entombed.

Short, interesting game: Murder Dog IV by thecatamites, Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, Howling Dogs by Porpentine, “some Increpare game”, there are more, they are out there. You could show someone LSD: The Dream Emulator and I think they’d “get” it. You can drag out fascinating old games like Captain Blood or Kult by Exxos if you’re ready to talk about why ideas in them are interesting but the experience of playing them from beginning to end is less so (just be honest about it.)

If someone is “interested in postmodernism,” I think you can start a conversation with them about what’s happening when you’re simultaneously inhabiting a game/narrative as a character/actor and manipulating the game itself as an object.