philberto

Thanks for the really interesting post. I'm afraid I'll now continue the move away from Pedercini's talk, something I think I probably initiated. I think you're right, but I also think that capitalism is more pernicious than that. For me, it's important to understand that the cultural sphere is not something completely separate from society and our experience. As something material, something produced, art reflects and is directly implicated in the dominant mode of production even (or, perhaps, especially) when it tries to portray itself as autonomous and external to our experience. Bad art tends to exploit its appearance as something external. In portraying itself as something autonomous, it can appear as the justification of the natural and the familiar It's like comfort food, we consume it and it makes feel okay for a little while even though in the long run we know its probably really bad for us and not all that good. At the same time, good art cannot simply be critical in the polemical sense, i.e., something simply negative. That too tends to reconcile us to reality. It acts as a kind of catharsis. We take our bad medicine and move on with our day. The consumption of the artwork is substituted for any actual critical reflection. So for me, good art is not simply critical in the polemical sense, but is something that fundamentally estranges us from the familiar. At their best, both art and criticism open up a horizon of possibility, something that is not possible from the perspective of an form of art that merely reconciles us to what appears most natural. I'm just finishing a PhD now on Marx and a guy named Walter Benjamin. I'm basically looking at their concepts of criticism, but I've only really thought this through in regards to the criticism of art in a more narrow sense, basically as literature. I haven't really thought it through regards to video games. For Benjamin, at least, it was important to not think of culture and cultural objects as separate from the social form under which they were produced. To make use of a boring technical term, culture is not an ontologically separate sphere distinct from society. Basically, I think it's safe to say that video games are a form of art that are particular to capitalism; in a sense, the capitalist mode of production is the ground of their historical possibility. If I'm right, this creates an interesting paradox for video games if they are to be critical of capitalism: they have to criticize the very ground of their own possibility. I'm really not sure how this could be confronted. I also think it's because of this you get the irony that Pedercini alludes to. Sorry for the ramble. Going to stop before I get any more abstract (as if that's even possible!). [Edit: I also should not that I don't think its necessarily the job of video games to confront or criticize capitalism, . Nor do I mean it as a negative judgement to suggest that maybe that cannot, I actually think it's problematic for art in general. I just think it's interesting to confront the question of how such a confrontation might be possible, given that video games have certain characteristics that I think make that endeavour paradoxical.]

Baudelaire is one of my favourites. There's a handy online version of his Flowers of Evil available (http://fleursdumal.org) with both the original French and English. In terms of something more modern, I really like Paul Celan, but, unless you're into high-Modernist reflections on the loss of meaning following the Holocaust, he's kind of hard to recommend. Rimbaud is also super cool and there's a really awesome collection (Rimbaud: Complete Works trans. Paul Schmidt) of his poems/fragments that weaves them in with letters and biographical details.

In my understanding, techniques such as montage, in both its literary and filmic form, emerged as a reactions against rationalization and are later subsumed into that logic. Its appropriate that literary montage emerges first in German Romanticism and its reaction against instrumentalized conceptions of art and nature. It emerges out of its particular historical context in a way that it does not when you see montage externally applied in a Hollywood film. So, I'm not sure literary montage could be effective anymore, especially since, as you say, it has been exploited in order to reinforce precisely the form of experience it was meant to subvert. Basically, I think the big problem is less the application of a specific technique, but, rather, the emergence of a form or technique that is specific to video games. I mean, in a way the games that Pedercini criticize are interesting because they're so directly reflective of our experience in a capitalist society. Of course, they don't subvert that experience, but exploit and reinforce it. What I find so interesting about games such as Papers, Please and Prison Architect is that they directly implicate the player in that experience while also forcing at least some level of reflection. There, I think we find a technique emerging that is specific to games while also being reflective of the social reality in which they are created.

Hi! I'm Phil from Canada. I'm finishing a PhD in philosophy and, probably as a means of procrastination, have started to play a lot more games. While my PhD is not game related at all, I think I would like to start writing a little bit about games and gaming culture. I very much enjoy both Idle Thumbs and Tone Control and thought it would be cool to chat with some like-minded people.