When White People Attack: NPR, Academia, and Vidcons

Let’s just start with this: monoculture is a stupid word.  A lot of words are stupid words.  Not of their own accord or anything, just by merit of their most frequent users not really having anything important to say with them.  This isn’t to say that not-saying-things is some sort of crime.  If anything one of the redeeming aspects of vidcons is their frequent lack of forceful meaning.  Basically what it boils down to is this age-old truth.  The harder you try, the more likely you are to fuck up.  Formalized academic endeavors are quite frequently perpetrated by people so eager to outrun the competition that they can’t keep up with their own feet.  But enough about my past.  Let’s move on to vivisect others.

The article I linked to in “monoculture” offends my sensibilities.  First of all, it presents the concept of treating video games as a “medium for artistic experimentation and collaboration“.  Second of all, it treats this concept as new; semantically coherent, for that matter.  We’ll get back to this in a minute, but realize that much of what follows, leads here.

Cutting aside all the text and gibberish in the article, there are maybe two things that show up.  There’s the discussion about minimalist games vs. “the typical PlayStation 3 games, which include titles like “Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5.” Then there’s the standard goings-on about illegitimate semantic quibbles, based on several thousand years of bad philosophy.  An expected occurrence from academia.

What is the difference between the artistic game and the standard vidcon?  Art is semantically open to the point that any quabble over definition seems absurd.  Roger Ebert, in one of his timeless anti-medium tirades, contemplated the possibility of an Andy Warhol vidcon.  In his vision, it rested on a pedestal in a glass case, still shrinkwrapped in original packaging.  A debate over the nature of art is equivalent to a debate over which language has the most legitimate words.

Quote:

Santiago adds that she and Chen think of a video game as a version of a poem: “By that we mean that it presents ideas to the player, but it also asks players to bring their own experiences to the table as well.”

Response:

Shut up.  This wordliness could be summed up much more succinctly.  I should know, because I make a habit of converting everything from shorthand to longhand.  Here is the fixed version:  Vidcons should work as subjective experiences.

Much simpler, much more direct, raises a question much more immediately: why?

This is not a new discussion.  In fact, Select Button has been having this exact discussion since its inception.  With almost the same ridiculous tone, no less, which is quite the impressive feat.  But to all of you gaming sons-of-bitches who think that Braid or Winter Bells or Flower represent some sort of paradigm shift, you’re running in circles.  Conveying emotion through a medium is not a new idea.  Neither is minimalism.  Neither is any other thing we’ll ever see in “art”.  What we have here in the emerging tools of the medium are, at most, new instantiations of old methods; old concepts.  Why discuss the emotional impact of cutscenes vs the impact of player controlled scenarios, when you could be having an equally significant discussion over which profanity is inherently the most offensive?

Newsflash geniuses: If I want to evoke an emotion, let’s just say anger, it doesn’t specifically matter if I call your mother a whore, or even how I call your mother a whore.  Past that though, the truth is that it doesn’t matter whether I succeed in upsetting you or not.  It matters whether or not she actually is.

I don’t feel like talking about vidcons anymore.  I think I’ll go read a book.  The good kind; the kind that determines whether or not your mother is a whore.

– Kilroy del Dancefighter estaohfuckit