Long Days, Long Months: 1 August

Rediscovering my affection for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. But, as is my wont, "video games" for the most part bore me. The G T A games are an exception because the participant gets to kill and maim, drive crazy, thus killing and maiming more, and so on. The purpose of one's mission is irrelevant if one wants it to be - just kill kill kill. That word - "participant" - brings us back to what doesn't bore me. That term, "video games," is dumb. When digital technology got to the point of games like G T A, the medium became interactive animation. Whereas film is motion photography, making it an interdisciplinary art, mixing the visual with drama - as well, potentially, music - in animation one photographs - at least before digitization - visual art conveying something of literary import. While some refuse aesthetic understandings of games, the narratives are there for you to make of them what you will. Go ahead and imagine the "theory"-mad treatises young dissertators will write regarding.. yes, Interactive Animation. The Twenty-First Century will perhaps end up as fun (and deadly) as the Twentieth.

Earlier "video" games - from the arcade, Atari classics through the end of the century, roughly - did not require as much extensive thought on the part of the participant. They did not present complex recreations of the real world - instead, perhaps, evocative metaphors for life, as in Pong. Games - or, no, perhaps we should call them programs - like World of Warcraft represent Interactive Animation reaching its "Prog Rock" stage. Fitting that Hip Hop, another nascent art of the 1970's with a particular interdisciplinary approach, reached its "Prog Rock" position about at the same time. The task of starting out a new video game usually fills me with as much dread as listening to a 70-minute Hip Hop album, with all those skits and meandering raps filling up space that's already packed enough, idiots. Where're Kraftwerk and Frogger when you need them?