John Lanchester on Video Games
I meant to post this link a couple of weeks ago when it was first published, but this piece by the wonderful John Lanchester about video games is well worth a look. Lanchester is essentially trying to think his way around the question of what the aesthetics of a form which is built around interaction and creativity might look like. They’re not new questions, and anyone with a passing interest in science fiction would be able to invoke a half a dozen examples of imaginary worlds in which video games and their descendants are genuine art forms, but Lanchester is canny enough to grasp that there’s a gap between imagining such a thing and actually creating it, and that the question of how that gap is bridged, and in what context, depends in large part on the ways in which the conflicting desires of the visionaries who are driving the form’s development and the studio heads who are financing their vision are resolved.
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city of tongues 