Bang Bang Discuss Sunday, November 29, 2009

At some point in the last two years or so, perhaps since the annus mirabilus of 2007's third quarter, video games, as a general phenomenon, surpassed poetry in capturing my interest--this puts them just behind music and neck-and-neck with science fiction in the hierarchy of my personal and savagely irresponsible cosmos of forms. My conflicts with them are numerous: they're bad for the environment, they raise the heart-rate without offering any real exercise, they conflate violence and form, the critical culture surrounding games attributes an illusory agency to the user, using the rhetoric of "interactivity," that's just not there. But at least they create conflict, and games criticism is the last place you can actually find people talking about how a particular art form works, rather than what it's supposed to do, or where the author eats lunch or gets indigestion or teaches or how she feels about things contra other artists. The greatest thing about video games is that so few people confuse them with art. Most of it lacks the barbaric seriousness of the last century. Video games, unlike most things written or vocalised today, actually have a chance at becoming poetry. I've gone from using games as a reward system for writing to becoming very engaged by the culture surrounding them.

An interesting and relatively new site is doing a good job of rounding up the state of VG commentary. It's called Critical Distance. Take a look.