Why videogames are not art, and are unlikely to become it anytime soon.

Some time ago now, the great but ailing media pundit Roger Ebert wrote a statement to the effect that videogames are not art. He gave some reasons why. And the whinging from fanboy idiots who were clearly too young to even know what the word Atari means in this particular context was precious to behold. Not because Ebert‘s critique of videogames as an industry was especially well-informed, but rather because the near-illiterate responses betrayed a simple fact about the people making them. Specifically, they had no idea what the word art really means.

Varg Vikernes, Greifi Grishnackh, Buzrum… pick the name, but here is a bit about the music.

The original explosion of media attention around the Norwegian black metal scene occurred and was in full swing around the times of my fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth birthdays. I missed it, really. Being in my mid-teens, having a media that was still largely only one-way, and being in a country where the so-called music industry is basically entirely a suck on the knob of American and Japanese conglomerate music divisions, lent itself to that.

What really makes us different? A theoretical musing…

As I have been writing other pieces of fiction about one of my proxy characters, the proxy character of a woman he is in love with, and so forth, I have been doing what all good science fiction authors do. That is, I have been thinking about the message of the stories and how it relates to the world that inspired that message.