Game Conversation

If I have any regrets for 2007, it's that I didn't play enough video games. And Slate's sprawling epic gaming conversation (17 printed pages) is full of proof that I missed the year's most important cultural happenings. Sure, I put in my time with Desktop Tower Defense, threw the Wii control around a bit, and dabbled in Halo 3. But I didn't play Rock Band, I didn't play BioShock, I didn't play Portal, I didn't play Super Mario Galaxy... I didn't even play Scrabulous!

2 comments

Yeah - reading this and then blogging about it, I almost got the sense that we were witnessing the birth of game criticism proper. It's not that academic work isn't being done (even slow-witted me has written a paper on gaming) but that it takes a smart, populist journalist to make the links between culture and what it produces. There's a lot there too - there are, among other useful tangents, links made between a decline in literacy and the decline of long-form gaming. It might sound optimistic, but I think this whole Slate exchange is going to be something people will look back on in a few years when all mainstream publications have game critics in their Arts sections.

posted by Nav at 2007-12-17 00:18:04

I don't play as many games as others do it's my roommate's Xbox 360, not mine, so I'm just along for the ride but BioShock was just about the coolest game I'd seen in a long time. And I'm also glad the Slate piece gave some love to Portal; everywhere I turn, I think, "I could just throw a blue door onto that wall and disappear." Hard to explain, but impossible to put down.

posted by Dan at 2007-12-18 15:36:07

Game Conversation

Rex Sorgatz