sorry, Michael--I'm being a little harsh to snark about your panglossian nature. Lucky for me, I assume your rose colored glasses will prevent you from seeing me in anything but the best possible light. ;)

this is the best of all possible worlds

I think it could be argued in fact over the long run that the western is actually the genre form that has the longest and most successful history in film--we've got Meek's Cutoff and Django Unchained prominently displayed these days near 110 years after the Great Train Robbery, after all. It may well be that the FPS is just that same sort of thing--perhaps it'll vacillate in popularity over the years and might even seem to be approaching some sort of nadir at times, but just never goes away and retains an underlying attraction for audiences that make cyclical renaissances inevitable.

for me personally, the cacophony for the most part is too much to take and helped to overwhelm me--at this point I don't even read about or play videogames any more (save for the occasional trip here or elsewhere). At all. (Since I tried--and failed--to play Yakuza 3 last fall I haven't even turned on a console or taken in a browser game for more than 5 minutes). It may well be an interesting living and breathing ecosystem for many and I know full well there are interesting things out there to play and talk about, but to be frank as far as I'm concerned it's just not worth the personal investment in time and energy (not to mention money) to sort the wheat from the chaff any more. I started playing videogames in the arcade days of the 70's, but I just can't find it in myself to engage with the form and the chatter any more--I'm sure that doesn't mean anything beyond a single person's personal reaction to the environment, but for what it's worth the babble is a lot of what has helped to drive me away from caring about something I engaged in constantly for over three decades.

Don't stop believin'" --Journey

long time listener with little constructive input (as always!) but whatever you do I'll probably listen to. I'm fairly out of touch with the whole videogame scene these days, and your podcast is one of the very few I have stuck with. I think you should just do what you want to do with the format, & as long as you still feel it's worthwhile I'm sure it'll work out fine.

Michael, don't worry overmuch about the thing with your daughter--soon enough it'll all come full circle, and she'll be staring at screens and ignoring you. ;)

This was cool. I'll admit that my tangential experience of GDC over the last couple days via twitter has been mostly kind of annoying, so this low key wrap up of what's cool about it from Mr Sunshine (heh) was a right good antidote. However: programming as the most complex human endeavor ever (or words to that effect)? Not to disparage the hard working coders out there, but it seems to me that we ain't exactly talking about Bohr, Heisenberg and Dirac et al cracking the quantum physics basis of the universe when it comes to sussing out the back end of the latest consumer electronics product. That seems like a bit of hyperbole to me, but then again: I'm a skeptic by nature. Looking forward to more of this, though. Thanks as always for taking the time to do this sort of thing.

Fair enough! I freely admit that theater is the art I know the least about (and Broadway theater even less so) so if you say Taymor and the production deserve the benefit of the doubt then that's good enough for me. I have my own knee jerk bias to a lot of corporate approaches to art, so probably I should be more forgiving of some artists that work in that area than I tend to be. And thanks for the clarification on the second point, where I generally had assumed you were just being overly broad (I mean, what ahistorical guy would constantly pull out Night at the Opera references, anyhow?). I personally feel strongly that historical context gets short shrift in a lot of videogame criticism, but I do agree that there's a lot of room for more focused work that doesn't worry so much about the baggage that surrounds a lot of properties.

Hmm. Thought provoking as usual, but the cynic in me has a bit of trouble reconciling the idea that a megacorporate musical seeking to horizontally integrate a fifty year old character into a different medium for a comics powerhouse is very much related to the handful of tiny games churned out by individuals in the third to last paragraph. These seem to me to be margins of very different sorts, and I'm not sure they're really that comparable. Additionally, I find this bit a little troubling: if we can allow every game to stand in our consideration untethered to other games or preconceptions in that it seems to posit for critics the possibility of an objective, ahistorical stance from which they would best be able to assess a particular property. Personally, I feel that though a critic should of course at least strive for a certain objectivity of purpose that what also needs acknowledging is that at base that objectivity is in many ways an utter fiction. No critic comes to any property unbiased, as there is always a floating continuum of feelings, experiences and knowledge that will affect just how something is experienced by an individual. In a similar vein, I don't think that any property ever exists "untethered" to others--not within its own medium, in relation to other media nor in its own social and technological setting. To my mind, properties simply do not exist as stand alone entities in the way you want them to in that sentence and thus cannot be fully assessed in this manner. I feel largely that a criticism that just attempts to look at a property untethered is perhaps a criticism setting itself up for failure. For a game--like a painting, a piece of architecture, a novel--exists not in a vacuum but as part of a continuum. A critic of paintings that tried to comment on, say, Edouard Manet's Execution of Maximilian as an untethered entity would be doing both the artist and the critic's own audience a disservice--for the work exists not simply as itself but as part of a series that is intimately tied not just to the history of previous paintings but also to concurrent streams of technology (photography, printing, news transmission, etc) and politics. In the same way, I can't imagine that a critic attempting to treat a videogame property as a standalone product could create something as rich as one attempting to contextualize that same property within a historical and social milieu. Would a critical examination of Doom be better served by trying to cast off its associations or by considering its place in videogame history and its relations to influences like the arcade, the movies and the "wild west" of the early networking and personal computer days? Given your background in history, I'm quite sure I'm not mentioning anything here that you're not already cognizant of. But that said, if it is in fact the critic's job to assess the meaning and impact of a designer's formal choices then I'm not at all sure that attempting to look at an individual property untied to others is the correct path for critics to go down. Because pieces of art do not stand up alone and pristine as artifacts untouched by what went before and what is happening now--they are, instead, works that operate inside a tangled weave of influences from within and without their own media corner. A videogame is very much not an untethered work, to my mind, and can't really be assessed completely as such. Better that it be looked at in relation to all the varied strands that connect it to the world in what really is, for lack of a better word, a web. Merry Christmas, Michael. (All I got you was this critical post!)

the pithy quote isn't really meant to imply that there aren't other audiences for games than the ones that like violence, just that violence remains a popular arena for entertainment through the ages as we tend to be such aggressive apes in so many ways. it's one that people in large numbers apparently do often want--I clicked your link, and saw that while there sure are other nonviolent games in the top 10 of 2009, it's an awful shooty one that sold the most copies. Also,3 of the franchises you mention--COD, Halo and GTA--all pretty much are playing musical chairs in the "entertainment franchise that generated the most dollars in sales" sweepstakes over the last decade, so it's clear there is large demand for such properties Myself, I don't really think that the magazines above represent the "american media" in any larger sense--they represent niche publications that are catering to a niche audience, albeit one with a lot of purchasing power. My suspicion would be--though I'll admit this is all supposition on my part--that the demographics of the reader base for these magazines skews 18-49 male, so that their editorial tendency is to highlight on covers the sorts of games that demographic is more attracted to. This tendency is probably also underwritten by the fact that this is a very valuable demographic for the advertisers whose ads support the publications themselves. I might be willing to entertain an argument to the effect that perhaps the publishers are caught in a self reinforcing feedback loop wherein they are shooting themselves in the foot by failing to broaden their readership through more promotion of, say, Wii Sports on their covers to attract a different and wider demographic. But my (generally more dominant) cynical side feels maybe like they are pretty cognizant of what it takes to sell magazines to the crowd that tends to buy their publication and they see that their numbers go up when they promote violent games that sell really, really well. For me I realized a long time ago that I do not "belong" in any sense to this part of gaming culture. I've never played Halo or COD, and all of my forays into GTA have pretty much devolved into unfinished games where my only real pleasure comes from exploring the world and ignoring the storyline. I tend not to spend money or attention on these properties because they don't particularly interest me, but that doesn't mean that there doesn't exist a huge audience who represent many, many entertainment dollars for these games. I figure that it's these people that the magazines above are largely catering to, and if putting people with guns on their covers helps them sell copies then it's probably a viable means of marketing their product for them. If touting violent games on their covers allows them to sell issues and stay profitable, then it's likely a worthwhile business move regardless of whether or not people such as myself want to read their magazines or not.

Like The Kinks said: "Well, it’s been said before, the world is a stage/A different performance with every age/Open the history book to any old page/Bring on the lions and open the cage. Give the people what they want."

I figured that was what you'd say, given the nature of the form. This seems like a fairly intractable problem--I'm not sure how you could best give the kids a flavor of this sort of seminal game if they hit unclimbable walls during playthrough. It seems to me to be somewhat similar to the art historical problem of giving students a sense of things like the dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire or Allen Kaprow's Happenings--its really impossible to get the immersive, interactive nature of those works to come alive when all you have are static scraps and historical fragments to convey meaning with. I wonder if seminar walkthroughs or narrated clips (akin to those Kevin B Lee Youtube film essays or similar experiments I've seen a handful of people attempt with videogame criticism) would be a worthwhile approach. You do at least still have the original work to handle in some capacity, which beats having nonsense poems and pictures of Hugo Ball in his metal costume to try and show its historical worth to students. This kind of thing wouldn't get them the immersion that we might once have had with a property like Ultima, but a visual approach might help to at least aid them in locating the property inside the history of the form and to be able to contexualize its relevance in the development of the games of today. But what do I know--I just work with students, I aint no teacher! ;)

GOG has apparently just come clean that the whole shutdown was a hoax for publicity. That is probably one of the most misguided, poorly handled pr campaigns I've ever seen. I'm curious about one thing here though: do you think this is the same sort of thing as trying to get kids who have grown up with modern movies to accept, say, a black and white silent masterwork,? Or is there something qualitatively different about doing the same thing with games? Will you change your teaching approach more along the lines of how you might tackle that with film history (by for example contextualizing the work inside the history of the medium and mostly showing excerpts like I got of Birth of a Nation in my film history classes--presumably because our prof knew we'd probably flake if he showed us the whole thing) or is that an untenable approach when it comes to games given how hard they are to meaningfully excerpt?

that'd be great, I'm much better in small groups than I am in teeming masses of humanity. Maybe there'll be a John Ford festival halfway between where we each live. Or we can road trip to meet Ben Abraham on the top of Ayers Rock...

ah, good. now I can experience the wonder of these sorts of conventions without actually having to cozy up to that sweaty, slightly frightening and apparently male dominated horde!

yeah, that's not good. though while I'm not super concerned about FPS's in general either, in a world where drone pilots in Afghanistan use a control device that apes the one the Xbox uses so that the military can make use of the virtual skills kids have picked up to do some real world killing, I don't think we can say that there's no line at all from games to death on the battlefield. Somewhere between "games teach kids to kill!" and "oh, it's just a videogame" lies a messy reality where the military industrial complex sometimes makes use of traits learned in entertainment to put people down for good.

having not played a single game on your list, I can't really speak about whether that's you lowering your standards or a surfeit of quality offerings. But as someone who is mostly playing online or downloadable freebies these days (though I'll admit, being a Westerns guy I finally broke down and bought RDR when it was Amazon's Gold Box deal today), I suspect it's the latter. Because there things seem also to be pretty good (list also limited to just stuff I've found or been pointed to since mid-June): 60 Seconds to Save the Queen Black and White Hundreds One Button Bob Go Go Marine Squad Treasure Tower Coma Looming Cut It Sanctuary Pond toss onto this that recent couple hours long demo for Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (http://is.gd/dDDLL) and there's all kinds of good stuff around, even for gratis. (I actually can't wait to pay for this latter full game in August though--I know you generally hope to be away from the computer to game, but you should try and take a crack at this demo. It's really good).

I actually did write about movies (mostly DVD's, really) for Box Office Prophets for 3 years or so: http://is.gd/dzC0z as far as I'm concerned, the two best pieces are the Carole Lombard appreciation and my look back on my moviegoing life (Why, In My Day...aka Hyde is Old). Though the Kill Bill piece aint bad either. I got tired of writing an article every week for no pay, though. I honestly don't know how you do it.

ooh, the Thalia. I loved that theater. I really miss revival houses too--Cambridge still has the Brattle, but now that I'm not in Boston proper I don't get there much anymore. Happy that I could hip you to that new reissue. But don't blame me when you get all weepy! ;)

I haven't played Deathspank, but to me the essence of most comedy (and most especially the Marx Bros) is timing, and I would think that is the spot where the interactivity becomes a bit of a problem. With pace so related to skill in videogames and with an audience of individuals with varying levels of adeptness, I'd imagine that comedy is a bit of a developer's nightmare. But I'm interested to see where you're going with the table setting, and any excuse to bust out "Duck Soup" is OK by me. (Aside: have you seen the recent Criterion release of McCarey's brilliant & heartbreaking Make Way For Tomorrow? If you haven't, you should).

whoa now, that's a *lot* of blathering in the comments. And it seems like only yesterday I was finding this site and using it to complain that no proper history of videogames had yet been written...

it's what I do. ;)

Personally, I don't think that the fact that there might be simpler tools for the masses means in any way that more sophisticated tools won't continue to be developed and used by more expert users--it just means that the basic skillset can be more broadly and easily accessed. For example, just because we are having this conversation now in a personal computer, GUI environment doesn't keep those people who know machine assembly language from developing things in their own arcane languages on supercomputers that would be impossible for most of us to grasp. Or that when Polaroid and Kodak brought out simple point and click instant cameras that allowed a much wider swath of people access to basic photography that more professional users couldn't continue to use the more advanced equipment that continued to be created for the market from manufacturers like Canon and Nikon. It mostly just meant that millions of people got the ability to do something simply that was previously the province of only those who had the time and expertise to utilize more difficult tools. The mere existence of those more accessible cameras didn't in any way obviate, cheapen or impede the development and use of tools in more advanced niche markets--it just let more people in on the fun much more easily.