Something worth reading

Right here.

I ran into a bet linked through Penny-Arcade about the nature of art and videogames. It ended up the next day at the New Yorker reading about the decline of reading. I have to say that it was an interesting journey and certainly one that I found to be highly interesting. The basis for all this was a wager on how videogames will evolve within our culture. The threads that were followed were diverse, and created a discussion about the nature of art, entertainment and how we judge culture.

In the end, video games, TV and Movies are a different type of media than books, and they cause different types of stimulation. Reading a book allows you to populate the world and characters with your own vision of them. The act of being entertained is more participatory and imaginative. On some level video games represent a reflection of this ability, while the plot involved may be straight forward, the best games allow you to interact with it, color it and make your own choices based on it. It's not the same as reading, as the world is shaped and colored by other peoples imagination, but it's less passive than TV or a movie, where everything is following someone else's idea of what is interesting.

Personally I prefer books, I like having the time to pursue tangents and minor characters in my own imagination before continuing with the authors story. It's why I dislike movies based on books, since they tend to calcify my image of the characters and the setting. Also, they tend to be rubbish, but that's not the key point. It's interesting to note that the best horror films tend to work on the same premise - that what you can imagine is more frightening than what the film can show you. Alien used this to its great advantage and once the alien was revealed the franchise became action movies instead of horror. In the end a book requires a level of interaction and a skill set the dwarfs that of video games, it's simply a skill set that is much easier to acquire (literacy) and a type of interaction that we encourage more (imagination.)