Don’t Kick Food!

A series of traits, the posession of which enables a person to self-identify as a “nerd”. Recent attempts to market to nerds have begun a process of commodification of this quality, leading to feelings of inadequacy and acts of overcompensation through extreme responses to media texts targetted at this particular demographic. An example: the tendency to shout, “Oh my god! That is the perfect ending! That is the best ending ever!” at the end of Snakes on a Plane, treating it as Perfect Film, rather than what it is: a competent, entertaining summer horror movie that simultaneously acknowledges its place in a B-movie tradition and its role as a niche product.

I promised pictures. I deliver pictures, all taken in my new dining room, with its sundry qualities of light:

These pictures are noirish because they’re black and white and have shadows:

(All photos taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT and some crappy lens that I will one day replace).

This has nothing to do with Guitar Hero or photographs - it’s merely a collection of links to articles meant to illustrate a theme in video game writing (as you can see, these articles have a span of a few years from the earliest to the latest), looking for a path video games can follow that is analagous to the growth of other media/criticisms.

This is, in theory, a Good Idea. A logical step to overcoming the popular notion of video games and their players as insular (is this still a notion? I don’t know. Maybe I’m too insular) is to become uninsulated. I believe in the importance of context. Post-modern theory may claim it’s irrelevant, but I would say that fluidity does not necessarily imply irrelevance.

The problem with this act of contextualization comes from ripping the contextualizers from their own context (I apologize for that phrasing). “Citizen Kane” and “Pauline Kael” (in some circles, Rogert Ebert fit this particular role - at least until he declared games could not be art) become short-hand for “The Film that Defined Film as Art” and “The Critic Who Legitimized Film”. Citizen Kane did not spring from the ether, unprecedented. Film criticism was around a long time before Kael (if you have an interest in film criticism, both historical and contemporary, friend Andy at No More Marriages! has essays and links galore).

The article about Merchant Ivory caught me totally off guard - I really don’t have anything to say about that. Maybe it’s just my Film Studies education talking, but I wouldn’t consider a Merchant Ivory film to be “elite” cinema.

A few months back, during a flurry of calls for gaming’s Citizen Kane, I considered doing a piece about the film, questioning just what its importance was. Surely, all of these references to the film and its (missing or soon-to-be-discovered or already extant) video game counterpart were well thought out. They would stand up to intellectual scrutiny, to an actual researched understanding of the situation that faced the two media as they evolved.

Then I got lazy, and I got frustrated, and the articles stopped and the compulsion to respond to them passed, and life went on.

Just because history is written in a way to suggest that Kael changed criticism and Kane defined cinema or that Merchant Ivory films are highbrow doesn’t mean that it’s actually true. Debates about whether or not games are ART! would be more productive if they engaged and challenged any debate on the definition of ART!, instead of saying, “I cried when Aerith died! Games evoke emotion! ART!” (after all, a not-that-old school of thought suggested that Art encouraged distance and contemplation over emotional response, that horribly lowbrow experience - and it was Aerith’s death in a cutscene, not during gameplay, to which you responded. Because that made it real. That made it FOREVER.)

Pictures and Guitar Hero soon. But not pictures of anyone playing Guitar Hero, because that just makes you look silly.

Quite possibly.

While I don’t have anyone as high profile as LeeLoo guaranteeing that things may be written here soon, I assure you they will be. Until then, read the post below about Hitman and my own personal difficulties about writing about games, or this post about Silent Hill, its critical reception, and what value that particular video-game-to-movie adaptation has.

What’s on the burner? If I can make it work, a piece about music games (mostly Guitar Hero), music, and performance. Or possibly just more photographs (once I get my laptop back up and running).

What’s not? Pictures of kittens.