Ian Bogost
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816699117
- eISBN:
- 9781452952406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816699117.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. ...
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More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. But this seems unlikely, and not just because games remain a niche interest despite the fact that so many people play them, but also because the twenty-first century is an era of media fragmentation, of tweets and Instagrams and animated GIFs and memes, but one still built around traditional media forms: text, image, and moving image. Maybe it’s because games are as much like appliances—toasters or rice cookers, say—as they are like art and media. We operate games, we use them like we use soaps and rice cookers. But yet, also use them like we use cinema and literature. It’s time to embrace both halves of games, the art and the appliance, by treating each game as the weird, unholy confluence of culture and apparatus that it really is.Less
More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. But this seems unlikely, and not just because games remain a niche interest despite the fact that so many people play them, but also because the twenty-first century is an era of media fragmentation, of tweets and Instagrams and animated GIFs and memes, but one still built around traditional media forms: text, image, and moving image. Maybe it’s because games are as much like appliances—toasters or rice cookers, say—as they are like art and media. We operate games, we use them like we use soaps and rice cookers. But yet, also use them like we use cinema and literature. It’s time to embrace both halves of games, the art and the appliance, by treating each game as the weird, unholy confluence of culture and apparatus that it really is.
