[Prestidigitweeze]

I appreciate the reply, but it sounds as if I haven't make myself clear.

Originally Posted by Algiedi

You said it yourself, it doesn't prove anything. . . . Technology is nothing but a gimmick until creators give them meaning (well that and lots of money for marketing, but that's not helping my point).

I said it myself for a reason: I didn't want to invalidate the possibility that new things could be done, nor, especially, to discourage you if you're thinking about exploring that possibility.

My previous comment had to do with the lifespan of the public's interest (so far) in the ideas you mentioned.

The one thing that made me think this could happen is very simple: lately I've either talked to or read about a significant number of authors that want to create in this kind of way - going beyond the text.

That sense of something in the air is a valid one, especially when we're young and have a (sometimes temporary) ability to intuit trends and innovations -- possibly because we're undistracted by the trajectory of our lengthy pasts.

However, the writers I know are always saying things like that. The only ones who don't (in my personal experience) tend to be established science fiction writers.

Probably out-of-topic, but that's exactly what one my tabletop-RPG friend says when I try to convert her to video-games RPG. Make of that what you will.
I'd also say as a "multimedia" creator that saying that only non-visual media develops imagination is nonsense (although I wouldn't say that to my friend because I like her very much).

It sounds as if I haven't made myself understood.

All sorts of media develop the imagination, but the written word specifically develops the muscle connected to transposing the events and images on the page to the universe inside your head. None of the work is done for you; in effect you become the book's microcosm, but only in the sense that that environment meshes with the collages made up of the feeds from your image repository/factory and the ever-mutating archives of your past.

It isn't that other arts and disciplines fail on the level of imagination, but that reading specifically develops that particular aspect of the imagination.

Any art that leaves out sensory input depends on you to fill it in. Fiction's drawback is also its virtue: it leaves out all of that input in the most direct fashion. We spent the past three decades moving away from leaving things out, only to discover that a segment of our culture longs for the exercise.

This is not meant to belittle any other art form or medium. Every art is reductive in a sense, and threads the dissonances of its silence with our minds' coherence.

Another example: Absolute music in the classical sense, which has the structure of an argument but is completely non-representational, so that the meaning is assigned internally -- perhaps even arbitrarily -- by the listener.

Now we're talking. Actually I'm still debating with myself whether we're just gonna end up reinventing video games. Or something kinda in-between? Or that both media are gonna meet half-way? Now that'd be cool.

As you probably know, I just praised one of the most hated games of all time for its aesthetic beauty and originality. It's hated by many gamers because the battles are often completely frustrating, but beloved by me because the experience of the game touches on so many things I find lacking in film but not in paintings and novels.

Believe it or not, I have high hopes for Canadian academics in terms of the development of games as complex art.

The tension I feel is between the narrative fullness of cut-scene-dependent hypertext and the freedom of the sandbox. If I were working in that field, I'd either try to minimize the faults of both by leaving out as much clunky machinery and directionless wandering as possible, or I'd try to find a third way of advancing, which didn't depend on trailer-like pieces of film to connect sandbox explorations and battles. It would be cool if the narrative were splintered and imbedded in the sandbox, so that the story proceeded by subtler impulses and decisions. You wouldn't be presented with multiple choices so much as collective events and stimuli as clusters that propelled you forward. The odd speech would be given within the gameplay, and would be spoken by a character in real time instead of "oof," "have you seen Mother?" or "die, pussy."

Ideally the speech could also be interrupted. Not skipped, not bypassed, but actually interrupted as you would that of an actual person, so that your impatience or abruptness could affect the dynamics of future interactions and the game's understanding of what you know and will learn voluntarily.

I dunno, video games and books have both always been the two big things in my life, so I don't understand how or why one could or should "replace" the other. Maybe it's just me being weird.

I say they're two different art forms and neither can replace the other. However, it's still too early to try to define what video games are or predict what they'll become. As I said, I'm pretty certain that in the near future, ordinary people will go on vacations in non-stochastic game worlds, and that vacation spots will be mapped out as LA and New York are in GTA, but on a far more minute level. I think there will be games without competition or objectives -- games in which one can wander as through a museum -- which are understood to be that by the general public. There will also be passive and active versions, depending on how much stress, responsibility and involvement the person who's playing wants.

As for other people, once again correlation doesn't mean causation. Kids read less books but play more video games does not necessarily mean one is the cause of the other.

I'll leave you to it, since that comment couldn't possibly be directed at me. You're addressing an argument I've never made in my life.

However, I have problems with YC myself. He's an amusing writer/ranter who's most brutally accurate when he sniffs out holes in a game's construction and the devs' involvement, but he's also a bit too free with his characterizations of others as self-important. After all, he's British, and has the national tendency to be most self-involved when he's trying to be humble. That's because class affectation means something different there than elsewhere, which is why Fowler thought saying French words with a French accent was the height of irritating pretension. He was so unconsciously enamored of royalty that the only reason he could find for such pronunciation was in people's desire to be upwardly mobile. Ironically, it was he, not they, who carefully imitated the unspecialized learning, understated conversation and enervated modesty of familiar nobility, while the person who cultivates a French accent might not care what anyone thinks. To ponder meaning is everyone's right as a conscious living being. If they derive enjoyment from it, then with all due respect, who is Yahtzee Croshaw?

BTW: I always seem to spell his last name as if it were Richard Crashaw's, then uneasily replace the a with an o.

It was fun exchanging ideas with you, Algiedi. Until the day when everyone's literate in the disciplines we've mentioned, I'll have to rely on sporadic conversations like this one with infrequent debaters like yourself. Pity that, since I could talk about this all day.