Why have so few people written about the culture of video games...

Why have so few people written about the culture of video games? It's a hobby that in this day is nearly as ubiquitous as watching television

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>culture
Because escaping your shitty life and occasionally jerking off to cartoons doesn't constitute culture.

Pseud detected.

Every element of society, every norm, every tradition, every minority group and minor hobby, represents the cultural whole. Video games rake in more money than mainstream cinema these days, and its nearly impossible to find someone under the age of 35 who doesn't play them.

Video Games are the new kid on the block. In the past, they were simplistic toys. Arcade games didn't exactly give much material. Still, movies like "War Games" were made. With the recent emergence of realistic virtual worlds and interactivity like never before, its inevitable that the next generation of authors will include video game elements in their works.

how is he a pseud? hes fucking right. youre a pseud, your entire post reads like a high school essay on video games

>personal attacks
>no substance
>defending lazy opinions

Veeky Forums is dead.

In his defense, there is already a board where people who play video games can jerk each other off.

Just because OP couched his question in terms of writing doesn't mean the subject matter isn't vidya.

There are an awful lot of near future works set in virtual worlds, like Reamde and Ready Player One.

this argument isnt worth wasting my effort on except for that post and this one desu

hundreds of people are writing essays about video game every week. gamergate would have never been a thing if cultural critique had not arrived to video games.

Ready Player One killed the genre for many years to come

It's an attractive activity because it offers immediate feedback for your skills/effort in a society with little to no chance of distinguishing yourself or improving your status.

That's all there is to say about it, really.

Is it time to for someone to start dumping the RPO quotes?

I see a lot of people interested in icycalm here. Some people are eager to jump in, others are intimidated. I've read his oeuvre about eleven times, so I just want say a few words and address people who are thinking about reading him or are just beginning.

Before you embark on your journey into the mind of a genius, you have to understand a few things that are very important. When we talk about icycalm, we’re talking about a man whose I.Q. could not be measured. Past 200, I.Q. tests get imprecise. We don’t know whether we’re dealing with a man with an I.Q. of 200 or 300 or what. We can’t measure it. When it comes to Icycalm-tier geniuses, the standard tests simply don’t apply. You see, Icycalm could have entered any field he wanted. He was a real-life Will Hunting. He could’ve been a doctor or a lawyer, or both, if he wanted. He could’ve been a pioneer in physics. He could’ve been a codebreaker for the NSA. But no. He decided to be a writer. He decided to devote his life to video games and to illuminating for us the way to critique them. That was the beauty and the tragedy of his life. In one way, it’s a blessing to have been born in Icycalm’s time, to be able to read his blog, to see his famous forum posts, which are already transforming people both intellectually and spiritually. On the other hand, I will surely die before we know even half of the secrets buried within the labyrinth of Orgy of the Will. That I consider a curse.

It’s been four years since Orgy of the Will was written and scholars have only begun to come to terms with its full implications. This is what you must understand. Icycalm reverse-engineered not only video game critique, but all of Western literature as well as language itself. Packed within Orgy of the Will is Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, and everything else. Hell, it even serves as an overview of human history, from dawn to today. It’s a web page you could spend a lifetime studying. A lifetime spent in bliss, no doubt. It would be more worthwhile to spend one’s life reading and rereading Orgy of the Will than to achieve being “well-read” in the traditional sense.

You must understand that, on your first time through, you will not understand everything Icycalm is trying to communicate to you. Don’t worry. He knew things about life that we won’t discover for decades. Your job is merely to get on the road. In the decades to come, we may, if we’re lucky, discover scientific applications for the new ways of thinking Icycalm gave us. We may have to throw out science altogether. We simply don’t know. For now, we have to be content with our vanguard roles. We are the ones who will break the ground and loosen the soil for Icycalm’s future interpreters. This is not only our pleasure, but our duty. And for that, as Icycalm famously said, "I wish you way more than luck."

I read the book but I would like to read some quotes again just to laugh

Believe it or not, video games just aren't as interesting as your stunted, sheltered mind thinks they are.

Video games specifically are a tiny part of broader topics that have been written about extensively, such as game theory or electronic media studies. Depending on what exactly interests you about video games other than emotional immaturity, those are two fields that you might find interesting, provided you aren't as stupid as you're coming off in this thread.

muchas gracias mi amigo

seriously tho wouldn't it have been nice to have a 10% less crazy version of this guy? the arcade culture essay is legit interesting. video game "culture" is more interesting than ironic points of reference for aging gen x'ers but there still hasn't been anyone who namedrops baudrillard and the neetch to do so

i'm sure i sound like a shill. i'm not. just disappointed i guess. and i would have liked more from a guy who was trying to rip holes in space and time with his mind powers

he wanted to be the pauline kael of game criticism. it's not like that would have been such a terrible thing. is this not worth considering?

>tfw when maybe you really did drink the koolaid after all

>tfw can't tfw

because nobody wants to read that

There is a ton of literature on the subject of the culture of video games

scholar.google.com/scholar?q=culture of video games

Go away, Alex.

Yo, Alex. You grabbed our attention. Show us the finest selection of your posts and let us judge.

>Ready Player One
yes

1. They're fairly new products of creative imagination in human history.

2. There are already quite a few historical texts and documentaries on various areas of the video game world.

3. There are essays and papers being published across the world in various universities. Look it up. There's been texts on game theory and the science and art of game design for decades and decades.

4. There's Icycalm, who you posted, and he wrote quite a lot.

5. There are a ton of review sites across the web writing stuff.

Who is?

He looks like a penis morphed into a man.

Too few? Too many have written about it.

>Pseud detected.
Says the frogger

I really liked IcyCalm's art essay and it really influenced my posting. Orgy of the will is obviously GOAT as well and filled with things I wish I had thought of first

game theory is nothing to do with "video game culture"

>It's a hobby that in this day is nearly as ubiquitous as watching television

Not a very interesting one.

There's the chronological history of its development, which has been done.

Outside of that, the only interest is in playing them. How many conversations (besides shit-posts and omg I'm so excited stuff on /v/) have you had about video games that have been interesting?

I can't imagine one. Please tell me about an interesting conversation you've had about video games. I'm open to listening.

You're retarded.

The most fedoracore post on Veeky Forums I've seen in a while.

I talk with my brother and friends about games all the time. If you're passionate about them, there's plenty to talk about, just like with movies or books. Not just talking about what you liked about the most recent games you played, or what you didn't like, but your thoughts on certain mechanics or design decisions, thoughts on how to tackle certain design challenges that you notice developers having, shooting out game ideas you have for feedback, comparing genres, discussing genres, discussing different reviewers or review sites, discussing overall response to certain games, discussing controversial topics that just came to light in the media (never seriously though, because all controversial talk is obviously clickbait retardation), talking about what from other mediums would make good games and how they'd work...

I could go on and on. I have hundreds of hours of talking with people about that shit behind me.

I don't really know what that means but I'm sure I deserve it.

Pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject.

Video games just poke reward centres in the brain. It is masturbation.

I understand discussing strategy ... but I'm with Ebert on this one.

It will never receive the mainstream high regard as a respected art form on the level that you give to it.

Mostly, video games are looked down at as tedious thumb sports.

It's the nerd olympics.

Personally, i'd rather watch the "special" olympics. Not that you aren't special, it's just that they aren't shy about it. They let their freak flag fly. Not that they have any control over it but it's funny to see.

So, I guess nerds are like "special" people who are using their mind control to force themselves to act in a someone socially acceptable normie fashion.

Because intelligent people don't play video games or at least don't give a shit about gaming "culture". Video games are just a culture industry plant to create false instant gratification to keep you docile. Games destroy people's lives and make them dumber.

That's a you need to know.

Darting your eyes about and coordinating them with your hand movements is kino.

Video games are products made by corporations to be sold for enjoyment. They are media and are arguably "low" art, but they will never be on the same level as literature, music, and the visual arts.

Moving your thumbs isn't exercise, fatass. Go outside.

>muh big bruvah

>arguably "low" art

Has anybody suggested that you are "too generous"?

>implying
Read Adorno, psued

You should see my thumbs.

>program your brain with the preferred narrative of internet freaks

thanks anyway

I've been aware of your work since about 2009 (hi friend I emailed). It has been disconcerting to watch you become progressively more far-gone as time goes by. IIRC, there was some shmup board you used to post on before you were banned and you actually sounded like a normal person before taking on an apparent God Complex. I was a little put off by your work circa '09-'10, but was genuinely interested by it. But it has changed over time, as it looks like you've lost your remaining sense of proportion and given way entirely to your own personal world of solipsism and infinite grandeur and other bad Nietzschean habits.

Ian Bogost made a career off of writing about video games as a culture.

this is pasta guys. just so you aren't disappointed and expecting to hear back from him.

>tfw secretly hoping he's not dead and is continuing to write essays about far cry 2 in his own blood from the inside of a swedish asylum under assumed name b/c still hiding from interpol

Oh well. Have to wonder if I'm not the only one who feels this way

>It will never receive the mainstream high regard as a respected art form on the level that you give to it.
I'm who you replied to, not OP. I understand that well. I don't expect them ever to.

But they never will for multiple reasons. Some of the biggest being:

1. There is a high threshold barrier of access to them. Put simply, most people suck at games and will never be good at them, even if they started playing as children.

2. If you want to enjoy them on the cultural level, it requires a high energy level output. Movies, theater, music, etc. do not have that same high level requirement. Sports do though, and so do books, in a sense.

3. But unlike sports and books, video games don't have social or intellectual perks associated with them. So it is an activity that requires a high energy level output, is fairly isolating, and does not have additional indirect perks associated with them that we need to survive — naturally, most of humanity will not see them as valuable.

Granted, there's still tens of millions of people who are into them. But there's hundreds of millions into movies, music, sports... there will never be hundreds of millions into video games.

That doesn't really matter to my original post though. My point was just that video game talk is just as interesting as long as you have the right passionate minds engaged in the conversation.

>Video games are products made by corporations to be sold for enjoyment.
And they are, in fact, enjoyable. I consider them the greatest blend of catharsis and adventure storytelling that is available in entertainment. So what's your point here?

Yes, it's not that the games suck, everyone else is just incompetent at them.

A slight variation on "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong".

>Yes, it's not that the games suck, everyone else is just incompetent at them.
Yeah, because that was clearly what I said, and the only point that I raised.

Thanks for not disagreeing.

I'm not holding people up to competitive tournament standards or anything. I actually don't like the tournament scenes at all. But a huge amount of people simply can't play them, and therefore they can't be a part of the cultural scene. There are a LOT of people who can't even get through a Souls game, and those games are easy as shit, let alone something like a full Civ IV or Age of Empires II match with intermediate to pro level players.

And it's worth pointing out, because even though you might say that every Tom, Dick and Harry that watches movies or listens to music might not have the best opinions on these things, they are at least able to access these mediums enough to HAVE opinions at all. Meanwhile, a lot of people can't form any kind of opinion on the majority of games because they can't get past even learning the controls and interface. They don't even bother. Or they attack something completely superficial about them in response and never even engage with the actual substance of the full experience, which is akin to just criticizing a movie for its poster or a book for its cover.

>being able to overcome a skill barrier is akin to being senile

because the only writing that could possibly emerge from it would be, on the one hand, advertising and valorization, for which game informer exists, or on the other hand, ruthless criticism of the inherent capitalistic fetishism involved in identifying a "culture" by the consumption of a commodity, an inconvenient truth that the so-called "gamers" don't want to hear and that the leftists are, frankly, tired of writing about, having written about it constantly since the 30s. meanwhile, the possibility of aesthetic criticism is totally co-opted by the fact that the game's primary purpose is to facilitate gameplay, a feature which only exists to make the game sell better, in which case see my previous point.

all that polemic said, i do think there are some interesting things to say yet about the RPG genre of games, especially as its statistical interpretation of human/nonhuman capacities bears for the ideological reproduction of human capital. the tv series westworld has taken this up to alarming and interesting effect.

The only people that like Icycalm are effeminate men who got bullied in school or have an inferiority complex.

The guy in the OP pic demonstrates otherwise to what you're claiming.

...

*tips*

Eh, what's your point?

The only people that think Icycalm has written anything of worth are people who have just started reading Nietzsche or pseudo-philosophers looking for a 'daddy' figure to look up to.

Who knows...you might be Icycalm yourself :^)

I probably deserve that.

Yes, you did.

Icycalm uses Ad Homs all the time. What's it like knowing you're a dork who looks up to a bald Greek playing video games all day scamming dorks like you on the internet?

Lol!

>but I'm sure I deserve it.

You sure as hell do. I mean, game theory? As in formal game theory? Electronic media studies? I can only guess at how pretentious your intentions here are.

>the game's primary purpose is to facilitate gameplay, a feature which only exists to make the game sell better

For the most part, you aren't wrong. However, not every game is out to solely make money. I think there are some indie producers who are legitimately interested in creating a beautiful game with a fresh take on gameplay.

>The only people that think Icycalm has written anything of worth are people who
are passionate about both video games and philosophy/critical theory, and can clearly see how he is/was a breath of fresh air among all the journalist schlock and resentful nerd self-fellatio going on online as far as video game criticism goes.

>For the most part, you aren't wrong
He isn't right either. His state is a non sequitur, that's why.

>A game's primary purpose is to be a game, a feature which only exists to make the game sell better
is what he is essentially saying. Which makes no sense.

>His state
statement*

>looking up to Icycalm

Didn't even know who he was until I opened this thread desu. Internet celebrities are pleb tier.

Can someone actually critique why every feature unique to the medium of video games has no value other than muh skinner box for nerds?

If art is going to move forward then it is going to move forward somewhere into the realm of digital interactivity. Literature is exhausted, Cinema is mostly exhausted, ect.

>Literature is exhausted, Cinema is mostly exhausted, ect.

I can't agree with you, but you're right that interactive media is the most promising way for art to progress, but this is being held back by conceptual bullshit.

Gamers consistently place Legend of Zelda as an artistic highlight. That's what we're up against.

>Gamers consistently place Legend of Zelda as an artistic highlight.

If it isn't the artistic highlight of the medium, then pray tell what alternative you propose this to be. What else currently does a better job of taking advantage of its potential.

What does someone get out of Zelda that they don't get out of a dozen other properties contemporaneous to it? Compare it to Ultima IV, which built gameplay upon a system of ethics as well as the typical dungeon crawler.

It's structure and progression is rotary. There is no true sense of formic expression via level design, progression, and gameplay.

Something like pic related could be a great keeping these elements and fixing everything else obviously wrong about it (and cutting out the shitty filler levels)

>That's what we're up against.
It's what Icy's up against too. So why do you all downplay him?

Kill yourself, you effeminate nu-male.

>What does someone get out of Zelda that they don't get out of a dozen other properties contemporaneous to it?

A hell of a lot. Nothing else in gaming attempts to be a gesamtkunstwerk in the same way that Zelda, especially with the hero of time games, does. Just looking the way the games make use of space and the contrast between space alone, there is no other game that manages to do the same on anywhere near the same scale. If you don't understand how the total experience of these games is greater than the combination of their individual parts than I don't know how I would really explain this if you haven't experienced it yourself. It's the play of total space/time possibility that makes Zelda what it is, along with all the other elements that are integrated with this.

>Compare it to Ultima IV

I haven't played Ultima IV so I cant compare, but how substantial is this ethical dimension that you'd say it's equivalent to what Zelda pulls off?

>It's structure and progression is rotary. There is no true sense of formic expression via level design, progression, and gameplay.

Please explain yourself and back this up. What has better "formic expression" due to "design, progression, and gameplay" then.

>Something like pic related could be a great keeping these elements and fixing everything else obviously wrong about it

So Yoshiaki Koizumi should go back and make Zelda more like Mario Galaxy? Why and what woudl the benefit of this be?

If you're gonna shitpost and use ad hominem, you might as well try one that makes somewhat sense.

You know as well as I do you're either some teenage queer boy or in your 20s.

What's it like paying to be in Icycalm's forum?

Loser!

The story, characters, and art/setting design are worthy of a pop-up book.

Mario 64 is more of a complete design of space and movement.

>or in your 20s.
Holy shit, you got me.

>What's it like paying to be in Icycalm's forum?
I never have. Not sure what your point is. If you / that guy is "up against" retards who think LoZ is art in video games, then he should be aware that so was Icy.

I've never heard of this guy until this thread.

The way you describe video game "art" could apply the the workings inside a watch. It's just function.

The characters are still awkward, like in that Dire Straits video. Not impressed.

Lurk moar. I've known about him for about 5 years now and even I was late to the game.

>The story, characters

The fact that you immediately bring this up, as if "playing through the story" were such a significant and notable part of what makes OoT what it is, tells me that you don't understand why the game is held in such high regard at all. Now, the specific storytelling techniques that the games pioneer are another thing, and that is somewhat worthy of discussion on a case by case basis. MM in particular does a lot of things that are only made possible by its total structure, even if its writing can be poor.

>Mario 64 is more of a complete design of space and movement.

Mario 64s goals are mostly completely different. You are right to say that the game is more focused on movement, which it totally does exactly at in ways that Zelda doesn't, but Zelda's ability to form a cohesive experience of total immersion based around the interactive possibilities its worlds offer is IMO unsurpassed, while Mario's spaces are largely just functional.

Will most likely 404 soon since this thread is barely Veeky Forums related. Wish we had a proper Philosophy & Critical Theory board for this shit though.

Just read masters of doom.

This doubles as the Philosophy and Critical Theory board, those generally fall under the category of literature or artistic criticism. People here don't want to talk about that stuff though. Most plebs ITT are too busy memeing about an e-celeb to give a fuck.

they insulted muh vidya! time to use every pretentious insult i can think of in one sentence!!

>one insult in the entire post

I sure hope I can do better than that. And no, I haven't played video games in weeks now. I've been losing interest lately.

The Wii turned 10 years old on November 19th of this year and I've been writing a autobiographical meta-ish short story. I'm interested in how people ignore this part of the culture which perhaps isn't going away and if it does it's still interesting.

not at all. it's a commodity.

this is a common opinion, but it does not make it wrong: majora's mask is a real achievement in the form. not because of the "horror" aspects, but because of the ingenuity with which the cyclical chronology is employed to craft the narrative while allowing the player a real sense of agency. this is a serious challenge for the form, and a challenge that i think a lot of art has to deal with nowadays—the challenge of balancing an endorsement of agency against overwhelming feelings of determinism.

If he was so intelligent, then why did he resort to crime, was it for the thrill?

Oh, Alex, stfu and post yr shit. For sure I won't read this Orgy stuff - the opportunity cost of wasting time on some edgelord's sputum is too high for me. Post the best selection of yr work about 2k-4k words or go away.

Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop."

Best book about the gamer mentality was published in 1968, and although the protagonist doesn't really encapsulate obsessives of certain genres, it's a pretty accurate portrayal of how WOW players feel about their characters.

But really, what interesting things are there to say about people who sit around all day smokin' LMAO and playin' Call O'Dutes?

for what it's worth, if anyone is still reading this, i exchanged emails with him a few years ago and talked to him once on steam chat. bought the one book he published, placed orders for the rest. i was a member of both of those forums, and i'm still listed as a member of his game group on steam too. i'd prefer not to say which one, this being the land of anonymous and all. but i'm def in there. i drank that koolaid big time

he was a very interesting guy. i honestly still don't know what to think about the whole experience after all this time. that site was my gateway into philosophy, and truth be told i really do think that he was up to something special, albeit in a very, very strange way. i'm saddened that he went off the deep end, because there was a time in my life when that all-black page with the essays by nietzsche and baudrillard and schopenhauer made more sense to me than anything else.

he was fucking impossible to talk to, and basically the problem was that you had all of these people who wanted to ask him questions - i mean smart people, people with fucking ph.d's in music, people from all over the world

>inb4 hurr durr music phd kys faggot

and you just got this sense sometimes that people were going, holy shit, here we go. somebody's going to actually do this, he's going to say what video games were all about.

i am 99.9% positive that he's gone now, but it was a legit rollercoaster. more than anything i wish he had just believed in himself as much as everyone else believed in him. i think that's it, in the end. that really is my feeling. that he set this up as a kind of a con and was amazed when people took him seriously, then found himself in a trap he couldn't get out of: that people trusted him more than he trusted them, and he tried to ubermensch his way out of this fact. in the end he couldn't and i think that's why he started acting the way he did. something like that, maybe.

>tfw drank the koolaid like an idiot

sorry. the problem was not that there were people, but that everyone was interested, but he would shut them all down. and eventually all the smart people were afraid, or driven away, because he would explode on them. even when they were really making sense. he would just erupt and have these meltdowns, and then get angry at you again afterwards.

and now there's that weird fucked-up stuff on the front page that looks like a car accident itself, and of course the fact that nobody talks or writes about what happened at all. anyways.

This is some good shit user. I knew there was a reason I still come to this board. Nuggets and trails to a grand future lie here.
what doesn't poke at reward centers in the brain?
litRPGs are this
My main concern is that there aren't enough old farts who debate about it. I think that because we have such good records of how games are made, how many people it takes, the romanticism of the past and a stuffy professor masturbating over dylan for years submitting him for the nobel isn't going to happen for video games.
We should celebrate this I think.

As for me, I already wrote something thats a human look using games as a plot device. The only way games get respect is if they involve human emotion and character development. They ignore that shit a lot, even in story driven games, because the people who make them and write for them aren't serious enough about making the characters real people. They just want the characters to 'look' real, which is holding games back from being decent respectable works of art.
In the future people will simply have to decide what deserves praise in a more private fashion instead of trying to make everything all about awards or how big the bank account gets.

Vidya as narrative art excels in a few formats. The art and worldbuilding of souls games, the sandbox nature of Crusader Kings 2 or Dwarf Fortress, and to a much lesser extent some 90s rpgs that bordered on "good" genre fiction.

Aside from that, they are almost 99% built by committee for a profit motive, subjected to test screening and quality assurance, and the editorial process is conceived to offend the least amount of people possible while enticing the greatest common denominator. Games are not subject to rigorous peer review and work outside of the effect on violence for the same reason that the cape-shit movies are not reviewed as serious works of art. Because they are not.

Largely this has to do with two things:

1) Video games are a uniquely decadent medium. The huge amount of money piled into the making of a video game means there are two streams- that of 1) the hugely expensive blockbuster game with zero risk or storytelling ambition, which, if well-written, is so, at best, in the same sense as we can appreciate "functional" nuts'n'bolts storytelling (where things work perfectly on a functional level, but are utterly void of any storytelling ambition, beyond "telling a good story"-- example of a game would include Bioshock Infinite, Game of Thrones is an example of a tv programme), with an absence of auteur culture (all the people /v/irgins consider to be "auteurs" are unimpressive), and that of 2) The "art" scene, where games are made by self-indulgent single developers, who, having spent all their time learnig how to code etc., have blown any chance of developing an aesthetic sensibility (look at how codified and dull these "art" games are stylistically). The problem in both of these cases is also that, whenever a game tries to tell a story, folk heap praise onto it and treat it as miraculous, blinding themselves to its limitations and faults. Just ask any /v/ampire for an example of good video game story-telling. It will always be 1) genre-fiction and 2) coupled with overblown praise, the kind given to children for being able to do basic shit like walk or gurgle in a funny way. This would make sense if video games were an infant medium. But they aren't. What /v/anguards are when they praise game storytelling is like a mother who still breastfeeds her 15 year old. Thus games are like that child, who is so coddled and cloistered that it never develops beyond infancy.

2) The lack of an individual code. This is debatable but, to my mind, games are completely reliant on codes found in other mediums. This leads to utter part interchangeability, where games feature (usually well-worn) Hollywood tropes, yet are never ever criticized for this. Games that blatantly cop their styles from films or novels are still upheld as shining examples of the medium. This is also a problem in Hollywood, and I blame Quentin Tarantino (but also Martin Scorsese etc, earlier). Beyond this, video games are like movies in their earlier stage, when movies relied on the codes of theatre to function. However, Film-making broke free of these codes and created its own in the first ten or fifteen years of its existence. Video games are a thirty year old medium, arguably older, yet have been unable to do so, mostly for the reason delineated in section 1), amongst other things.

It's painfully appropriate that the stereotypical /v/inaigrette is a spotty manchild, developmentally stunted, living with his over-bearing parents, to whom, though he lacks ambition and does nothing but eat chicken tendies and post on r/tumblrinaction, he can do no wrong. There is no more apt metaphor for the nature of video games as a medium than this.