"Adults Should Read Adult Books" - Joel Stein

[juv3nal]

But if I meet someone who isn't already into games, I don't really recommend they try this or that, whereas I am much more likely to try and recommend a piece or writing or music or film to someone who might not be as tuned into whichever of those forms already.

This is an interesting question because I think with cultural stuff in general, things that are *handwavy* "artistically significant" are often significant in the the context of/as a reaction to what has gone before and some of the "point" is lost if one is unfamiliar with the kind of thing being reacted against. And with books and music (though less so, I think, with films if you go back to Lumiere brothers or even Eisenstein era kind of stuff) a really old work can be approachable or appealing on its own merits so the barrier for entry to gaining that familiarity is lower. But I feel it's a much harder ask for someone to go check out, say, Wasteland (where you had to refer to a separate booklet for text description passages) or older interactive fiction (where limited text parsers are almost bound to generate frustration).

[Chris]

This is an interesting question because I think with cultural stuff in general, things that are *handwavy* "artistically significant" are often significant in the the context of/as a reaction to what has gone before and some of the "point" is lost if one is unfamiliar with the kind of thing being reacted against. And with books and music (though less so, I think, with films if you go back to Lumiere brothers or even Eisenstein era kind of stuff) a really old work can be approachable or appealing on its own merits so the barrier for entry to gaining that familiarity is lower. But I feel it's a much harder ask for someone to go check out, say, Wasteland (where you had to refer to a separate booklet for text description passages) or older interactive fiction (where limited text parsers are almost bound to generate frustration).

I don't entirely agree with this. You're describing a particular kind of value within a evolutionary line of a particular medium, which is definitely interesting and worthwhile, but not really what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about things being important with respect to posterity or placement in a literary canon.

For example, I basically jumped headfirst into modern literary fiction as an adult, not having grown up with it, so I was pretty unaware of the evolutionary line tracing, say, 19th century English lit to modern lit. (As a kid, I read a combination of "classics," and young adult/sci-fi/fantasy stuff, which I think is probably pretty typical for people who are demographically similar to me.) I've filled in some of those blanks since then, but I'm still REALLY under-read with respect to fully appreciating that context. So while I'm sure I'm missing a lot of stylistic and evolutionary subtleties and historical reactions, it's still entirely apparent to me that a good and thoughtful writer of modern literature is holding himself or herself to a standard of depicting human experience that largely doesn't exist (or is at least drastically underrepresented) in video games. That doesn't mean video games can't illuminate interesting things about humans or our world, but (I think) they are on radically different planes when it comes to the standards people seem to hold them to.

[juv3nal]

That doesn't mean video games can't illuminate interesting things about humans or our world, but (I think) they are on radically different planes when it comes to the standards people seem to hold them to.

Oh I definitely agree with this. I was just going off on a tangent about one source of some difficulty in getting the uninitiated to appreciate video games. The fact that games don't generally try to say interesting things about "humans or our world" is certainly another, probably more influential source of that difficulty, of course. Though I think it could be argued that instrumental music or abstract expressionism are in some way similar in that they primarily engage on emotional & aesthetic levels.

[James]

Plato's Kallipolis would have had no mimetic art for that very reason.

(That's one of the very few things I remember from my philosophy degree, and I had to look up "mimetic". I don't read enough.)

I thoroughly disagree with Plato on that point, incidentally.

I think to measure your experiences and achievements against some theoretical perfect life is a surefire way to drive yourself insane with disappointment and guilt, but perhaps that's because I'm lazy and lacking in aspiration. I should certainly do more than I do, but I think there's space in a life for both the grand and the trivial, and to reduce it to some sort of numerical comparison between what you have done and what you could have done is a folly. But, again, there's no reason to believe I have the slightest clue what I'm talking about.

EDIT: I don't suppose I'm really tackling Stein's claim head-on. He's giving a recommendation for the most fulfilled life. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps it depends. Great conclusion there. This is a worthless post.

[Chris]

Oh I definitely agree with this. I was just going off on a tangent about one source of some difficulty in getting the uninitiated to appreciate video games. The fact that games don't generally try to say interesting things about "humans or our world" is certainly another, probably more influential source of that difficulty, of course. Though I think it could be argued that instrumental music or abstract expressionism are in some way similar in that they primarily engage on emotional & aesthetic levels.

This is totally true--the difference is that instrumental music and abstract expressionism don't PURPORT to be about humans and the world they live in, at least not in a literal sense. They concern themselves much more purely with form, emotion, structure (or interesting lack of it), patterns, and so on. I think games have a lot of potential in this regard (and a lot of realized potential, for that matter), and yet the vast majority of modern games are still very literally about people doing things (often crass, violent, or banal things) and so they basically opt in to being stacked up against other forms of expression that are also about people doing things.

That's also my response to people saying "games shouldn't be judged against movies." I entirely agree with that, in theory. But that relies on the games in question not actually being like movies. The reality is that if a game tries to tell a story like a movie does, then of course it should at least in those ways be judged against movies. If you're going to tell a written narrative (in text or in visual representation of people running around or in audio logs or whatever), then you're signing yourself up to be compared to other forms that use similar methods of conveying narrative.

[Chris]

I think to measure your experiences and achievements against some theoretical perfect life is a surefire way to drive yourself insane with disappointment and guilt, but perhaps that's because I'm lazy and lacking in aspiration. I should certainly do more than I do, but I think there's space in a life for both the grand and the trivial, and to reduce it to some sort of numerical comparison between what you have done and what you could have done is a folly. But, again, there's no reason to believe I have the slightest clue what I'm talking about.

I think it's possible to try and strive for it without turning your life into a series of checkboxes or a numerical exercise. I think it's more about trying to embody a certain spirit than to actually mark things down as "this versus that." Of course it is "this versus that" in some respects, because we DO live lives with finite time to spend, but that doesn't mean you have to internalize it as such. I think Stein clearly made his argument in a very flawed way, but I think the spirit of the argument is more interesting to discuss and consider than the letter of the argument.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I hate the idea of our culture sinking into idiocy as much as the next person, but adults have been enjoying escapism since time began... Dracula? Frankenstein? Sherlock Holmes? The Three Musketeers? Robinson Crusoe? A Christmas Carol? The Invisible Man? The Time Machine? Around the World in Eighty Days? Ivanhoe? Tom Sawyer? Gulliver's Travels? Tristram Shandy? Le Morte D'Arthur? The Canterbury Tales?

[MrHoatzin]

A lot of those you mention are way way more than escapism.