There’s a good writeup of my talk on the Meanland site here, and they’ll be putting up video, but for those who can’t wait (or want a transcript of sorts), I thought I’d put up my slides & notes.
Click through the fold for the content.
Month: May 2010
Synecdoche: games, control, subtext, and art
Recently, there has been a resurgence on question of ‘can games be art?’, with the film critic Roger Ebert categorically saying that they can’t, and the writer Lynden Barber echoing Ebert’s position.
One of the cornerstones of their argument is that are defined as competitive pursuits built from rules and states and goals, and that within that definition, nobody has produced art. The call, then, is to reframe what we are talking about – that the word ‘game’ doesn’t properly encapsulate the evolution of the form.
Except neither do the descriptors ‘film’ or ‘novel’ or ‘writing’ or ‘comic’.