November 24, 2018

"Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male."

"But the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. From 'The Searchers' to 'The Godfather,' from 'The Sopranos' to 'The Americans,' what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form."

That sounds so right wing! Except the "deconstructing" part.

From "Red Dead Redemption 2 Is True Art/The season’s best blockbuster isn’t a TV show or movie. It’s a video game" by Peter Suderman in The New York Times.

The other day, I tried to watch this video, "Red Dead Redemption 2: 13 Things We Love About It (And 8 Things We Don't)"...



... but I had to stop because the enthusiasm of the players was just too... I don’t want to say annoying... but just irrelevant to my life.

I first encountered that video not at the NYT but at "South Park: All the Red Dead Redemption 2 References," which I was reading because someone I know told me he was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and the only thing I knew about it was it was the game everyone in South Park was playing when Al Gore was trying to get them interested in fighting global warming.

40 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

What is identity politics except the desire to live within a video game... a VR video game?

This is the overwhelming consumer demand of our era, the demand for a Holodeck, for a story telling environment in which the individual is the hero. The old third person story telling method is worn out.

The shoot 'em up VR video game dominates because it is the easiest to produce and returns the quickest profit. The touchy feely left wants its VR video games too. It wants to play dress up and sex shifting.

Creating a first person dramatic narrative with infinite branching possibilities is a very tough hack. Production costs cannot possibly be exceeded by profit. This is a problem that will be solved in the future by AI programming.

gspencer said...

Red Dead Redemption: I really did enjoy watching the overweight, loudmouth Bella-Abzug-type being punched in the mouth, tied up, and then fed to an alligator which in the end rejected her. Smart beast. It's how liberals especially the MSM should be treated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ7RicfseRU

rhhardin said...

Flight simulators don't count. Just a pleasant skill applied at the desk.

Mr. Groovington said...

World of Tanks for me, wifi allowing. SEAL clan founder, Asia server.

Curious George said...

Call of Duty WWII.

Bruce Hayden said...

Saw it at my partner's daughter's and SIL's last night. He tried to get our grandkids distracted with the game, but it wasn't working right. Got stuck in a snowstorm, and we were apparently supposed to be going with another guy to save someone. Maybe. Reminds me of eastern MT a century or so ago, so find it somehow compelling.

Koot Katmandu said...

I am about half way through Red Dead Redemption 2. It is a good game telling a good story with interesting characters. When games like this are done right it is like participating in an interactive movie. RD2 is a great game and I am slowly enjoying the show. Yes it is like a movie a slow unwinding story but you control much of the pacing and sequence. There 3 games that seem to show the future of movie game mixing. The Witcher 3 wild hunt, (the best really a love story as much as swords and magic) The last of Us, and now RD2.

As technology improves Movie and gaming will mix for the better. The interactive game can be outstanding.

Bill, Republic of Texas said...

The animation looks great. Is this on a PC? I thought there must be a new platform to play it on but it looks like it is available on Xbox one. If it looks like that on an Xbox, I'll have to dust off my old one.

Francisco D said...

My stepson is an extremely avid gamer as are his HS and college male friends.

For my generation, drugs, sex and rock n' roll prolonged our adolescence. Gaming seems to prolong the pre-adolescence of boys today.

It bothers me, but then I was bothered by pink hair and nose rings until I recalled my parents criticism of long hair, beards and blue jeans.

This generation will also survive and prosper.

David Begley said...

Some of these video games gross better than some movies. They are all the same.

A woman lawyer I know with an LLM in tax was excited to see Black Panther. I was dumbfounded.

Fernandinande said...

"Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male."

Young = frivolous. Male = bad.

But yes, we all hear old women say that they love video games which reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years as long as the games are also crude and violent but not frivolous.

David Begley said...

Those people in the clip sure spend a lot of time and money on these stupid games. Maybe that’s the source of the sex recession.

RK said...

I've put off immersing myself in video games until I'm 70 (more than a decade away), but this game is tempting. So is being a A-10 pilot, a sniper or NASCAR driver. It's all so tempting...

chillblaine said...

I'm inspired by this. I game when I want to self-regulate. If games are structured as reward, it works. Also, the gamer gets to practice resilience in game, when they make a mistake, and learn. Such a rich one here. Best.

bagoh20 said...

"""Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male.""

Am I too sensitive, or is that pretty much a standard version of the put down of all things male today. Young males are, as always, a core population of many problems, but this is not one. It's probably a valuable distraction and outlet for the need for violence among young males. Curiously, the gamers don't seem like type of people who cause most problems with violence. They seem more like type who avoid actual violence and risks.

I was never a gamer, becuase I deliberately decided to avoid it when it first started trying to pull me in as a young male. I saw how much time it swallowed and decided "Ain't nobody got time for that." I'm impressed with the whole level of the technology. It's very realistic and is both "grand and granular", but it isn't exactly going to the moon with 1960's tech.

There should always be a big place for recreation in our lives, but I can't help feeling that a lot of intelligence, drive, and time has been mostly wasted by our brightest with this stuff. We seem to be plateauing as a species.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

“I was never a gamer, becuase I deliberately decided to avoid it when it first started trying to pull me in as a young male. I saw how much time it swallowed and decided "Ain't nobody got time for that." “

Not a gamer for exactly this reason. Shit, life will run out before my ever-expanding reading list does. However watching my son play the first RDR I was gobsmacked and, by his accounting, the second is far more advanced. Maybe we are witnessing a moon shot and just lack the perspective yet to appreciate it.

Paddy O said...

Back in the good old days, our social betters would send these same young men to foreign places to kill other young men in real life. And the social betters would clap with glee and pat each other on the back and say glowing things about each other after the war was over.

100 years ago WWI ended. What was all that about? Games played by aristocrats wanted to add points to their totals.

50 years ago the sex, drugs, and rock n' roll peaked. Now we have California politics, STD explosions, innumerable dead from AIDs in the 80s, rock stars with palatial mansions selling a pseudo-story of rebellion to the easily befuddled, the virtual reality that is college campuses where people play at being woke and think it's real life.

People pay thousands of dollars every year (or more!) to watch athletes from schools they have no connection or players with no loyalty to their city selling their services to play games in extravagant civic monuments that take up valuable real estate. They sit their passively absorbing the whole event, thinking that cheering for a randomly colored side or having intense emotions about the outcome is somehow justifying our gift of life.


FIDO said...

Perhaps the word you are looking for is passionate

FIDO said...

Suderman is Megan McCardle's husband and an ardent libertarian, which is a smart Republican who can't help to continue to be a 'cool kid'.

So their love affair w drugs, whores and Academic frivolities and fashions to 'prove' their intellectual bone fides by sucking up bad ideas.

chillblaine said...

FIDO +1

FIDO said...

Men like to be heroes, even lower case ones. It is a male imperative. Girls used to treat them that way unironically.

Society gives our young men fewer opportunities to be heroes. Fewer frontiers.

Academia and Feminism has used post modernism to teach society, and particularly women, to disdain and toxify heroic male actions.
I specifically recall one Feminist horrified that we were lauding a that man died covering a woman in that movie theater shooting a few years back. 'He's not so special!'

Is it any wonder our young men are more interested in games than our current crop of cynical, Academy trained girls?

FIDO said...

Excuse me. Not 'be' a cool kid. TRY to be a cool kid.

Alas, like most nerds, they do not realize that the Left doesn't share. To be cool, you have to be a Leftist.

rcocean said...

Video games just fill the need for entertaining violence and heroism. Boys used to have TV and the movies but that got converged by the SJWs.

So has SF. which is turned in female/SJW/Fantasy.

Personally, I was a Panzerblitz/Il2 sturmovik kind of guy.

Etienne said...

I was so addicted to Redneck Rampage, that I was taking narcotics to kill the arthritis pain. When I finally reached the end of the game a week later, my wife took me to the Virgin Islands and set me out into the sun to boil out.

A week later I was normal again. Well, normal in a relative sense, compared to a serial killer.

Yancey Ward said...

All I can write is that I am glad these things didn't exist when I was growing up.

BudBrown said...

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time playing Blitzkrieg. Against myself. Back then it was a board game with dice.

Yancey Ward said...

However, the animation is frighteningly good. How much longer will it pay to be an actor in Hollywood films? I suspect that 20 years from now, you won't be able to tell the difference between live recorded action and animation.

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tyrone Slothrop said...

Red Dead is OK, but Hitman 2 is my game.

One thing that isn't really discussed is the high entertainment-per-dollar value of video games. An evening at the movie theater can easily cost thirty dollars, while a sixty dollar video game can give hundreds of hours of entertainment.

DUSTER said...

Over the long winter months I blow the dust off the PS4 and do some gaming, a steady stream of old fashions and being called a fag, or a noob, or a camper by some pimply faced 15 year old always makes me smile.

sinz52 said...

" How much longer will it pay to be an actor in Hollywood films? I suspect that 20 years from now, you won't be able to tell the difference between live recorded action and animation."

Voice acting (as in animations and cartoons) will be needed for a long time, but both visual acting and modeling may disappear.

Today's clothing design software already comes with the capability to generate a catwalk simulation without human models. It's far cheaper than paying a bunch of overpaid human supermodels.

Those graphics are still in their infancy, but this should give you an idea of where we're heading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmpyU8h5D6k

n.n said...

the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form

Administration and diversity. Male and female, masculine and feminine, respectively, and transgendered spectrum. Human life and human rights, and colorful clumps of cells and abortion rites.

A common cause for left, right, and center.

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rusty said...

I think . instaed of playing video games. I'll start collecting vintage french motorcycles.

ALP said...

Turn based tactical fan here. Think really complex chess. Teaches patience. Stop and think things through without panicking. Have a backup plan. All kinds of good mental practice can be had with the right game.

Megthered said...

I am a 62 year old grandmother who loves videogames. I have a PS4, Xbox one and a Steam account. I played RD 1 and will probably play RD 2. I have been totally ignored in video game stores and treated condescendingly by sales people when I ask about a game.They are amazed when they find out the game is for me and I know what I'm talkjng about. Ive been playing since Diablo 1 and Quake 1. Love them all.

Colin said...

"Violent and frivolous" can describe an awfully large amount of human activity. Video games are just one more outlet tapping that essential nature, just as much of other entertainment media.

It makes me wonder how movies transitioned from an idle curiosity, to mass entertainment, and eventually considered art. I remember Ebert opining that video games would never reach that pedestal due to the interaction element. That always sounded remarkably limited.

tim in vermont said...

Meanwhile a warship where five out of the six navigators were women, in Norway this time, not like the other one where women were advanced per affirmative action, lies sunk after a collision with a fucking fuel tanker.

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2018/11/23/wreck-of-the-gender-fitzgerald/

Remember the U.S. one that sunk near China where two of the officers were not speaking to each other? Give the warships rubber bumpers because operating on is perilously similar to playing a video game.

Qwinn said...

I'm a gamer and modder. Love the stuff. It amazes me how there can be thread after thread admiring a single painting or tiny poem, with all the self-aggrandizing "appreciation of art" taken as a given, and yet no one seems to even consider the *entire worlds* that are built in these games as art. Not even with the literal equivalent of a country's worth of landscapes, nature, sometimes excellent writing and plots, the equivalent of a hundred million works of art viewable from any angle in a single game and with the ability to completely immerse oneself and participate in the art and in many ways mold it to your own liking, and yet this is looked down on by those who can spend a day gazing at a single picture frame with all the ferocity that they spend looking at their own navels..

cyrus83 said...

The cultural gatekeepers in the media hate video games for a few reasons. First, it is a medium that has to actually cater to the tastes of its player-base in order to survive. Unlike Hollywood, the news media, television, or books, if a video-game company makes a dud of a game, or gains a reputation for making duds, they take a financial beating and could be out of business pretty quickly. Gaming franchises can similarly be ruined by a bad entry.

Second, video games by definition are designed to be either be "won" or in multi-player titles, for there to be winners and losers in a competitive format. The difficulty isn't to the degree that it was back when I was younger, but the player still has to be good enough at the game to see the ending and/or unlock all the features.

Since video games tend to appeal to the young-male demographic, a lot of the biggest games are designed to appeal to them. It is probably the one media segment out there where the biggest properties still aim for the traditionally masculine - whether that's an FPS shoot-em-up game, a guy rescues a girl plot, some sort of heroic quest to save the world, or a stop the evil (monster) plot. The media often harps on the violence in video games, but it's really a proxy to complain that the video game companies aren't making games with more progressive plot lines.

Video game companies really can't afford to however. They need to appeal to as wide an audience as possible to make enough money to cover the development cost, which means they have to be populist in nature, not politically correct. It also happens to be the case in this medium that Western developers have to deal with Japanese developers in a way that no other Western media does. The Japanese for the most part could care less about a Twitter tantrum from triggered twenty-something twits, so if the Western developers go all-in on SJW themes, the Japanese will eat their lunch by continuing to develop games people want to play.