*sigh*

The style of “no, YOU’re wrong,” argument can get kind of irritating. Particularly when you’re nominally arguing with someone you’re talking to as a friend, a sense of condescension can quickly sour one’s desire to continue a conversation. Not that I’m not guilty of it myself, but that was my immediate reaction after reading the last post.

Anyway:

Chaplin is widely credited as bringing a sense of narrative convention to film. I’m talking about the birth of film, around 1894, with “The Sneeze.” Then, we’ve got Chaplin, let’s just take The Gold Rush, at 1925. Or, let’s say Birth of a Nation, in 1915. These movies basically defined the “vocabulary” of film. Chaplin, in particular, essentially defined *how* to tell a story in film. Prior to Chaplin, most movies were simply perceived differently. They weren’t considered “high art,” and even Chaplin wasn’t considered “high art” until much later. The point is that the perception of film was purely as lowbrow entertainment well after twenty years after its conception as a medium.

For games, we’re past the 20 year mark, but at the same time, we’re still creating the technology that’s used to actually make games, so it’s a little trickier. I agree that most *content* is, by and large, unworthy of critical consideration. But the problem is that the content isn’t the be-all end-all of what we can talk about, in terms of gaming. There is potential area for legitimate, “highbrow” discussion of the medium in both the content, and the mechanism of the medium.

The point being, the *perception* of film in its first 20 years, and the perception of games, in their first 20 years, has been pretty similar. Same with comic books. The mass media *still* doesn’t believe that comics are a viable medium for high art, despite obvious examples like Maus, Astro City, The Watchmen, and the like.

In terms of the “academia” statement, the point was simply that no one talks about how The Sneeze influenced the history of film except academics, whose field of expertise is solely film. There’s nobody talking about even something like City Lights, which has some of the first close-up shot-reverse-shots used as narrative tools, except people who analyze film for a living. It doesn’t matter to most people, and no one’s discussing it outside academics. Similarly, there’s a lot of stuff that’s being discussed at places like MIT’s Film and Media Studies program as it relates to videogames in a similar fashion. But I guess this is all a digression anyway.

Doesn’t matter, though – your notion is that games attract the criticism and discussion they supposedly deserve, because by and large, what’s generated is garbage. I would suggest that games are an immature medium, and due to its potential, deserves *better* criticism and discussion than they currently receive. Clearly, we’re not going to agree, and moreover, there’s no *point* in even really discussing in in this format, which is really disjointed and irritating.