Questioning Edifying Games

In his call for this month’s Round Table, Corvus Elrod asks whether games can teach the player anything, associating this question with snobbish criticisms of the medium as being artistically good for nothing. This hypothetical critic’s argument that edification is necessary to aesthetic seriousness is reinforced by the “serious games” movement, which often produces bludgeoningly enlightening pieces about the tradeoffs involved in World Problems.

The Art of How

Form and content in the visual field of videogames

There is a fairly solid consensus now in cognitive science that visual information (and perhaps information from our other senses) takes two distinct pathways through the brain. The ventral pathway runs along the lower part of the brain, and carries information about things. This pathway focuses on what objects are: that is, what they’re called, what categories they fall under, and what they remind us of. It connects up with the language areas of the brain and those most closely associated with memory. It’s commonly called the what pathway.

What on earth am I doing here?

A valid question! Let me argue for my existence, in a roundabout way.

Last year, a writer for Esquire named Chuck Klosterman wrote an article called “The Lester Bangs of Video Games”, which asked why there is still no real videogame criticism out there in the world. Klosterman’s main point is that we lack the language for talking about videogames, and that this arises from the overly unpredictable and dynamic nature of the videogame narrative.