The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.

Shigeru Miyamoto Never Said That Games Were Art, AP Says

Have we settled that video games are art yet? Of course we have! The National Endowment for the Arts now recognizes games as a medium worthy of their funding, the Smithsonian’s Art of Video Games exhibition is a go, and Roger Ebert has retreated to his skull fortress on Film Critic Mountain. Case closed! Game, set, and—wait, Shigeru Miyamoto said what now?

Here’s what happened: The British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded Miyamoto a fellowship, and after accepting it, the creator of Mario and Zelda and Kirby and Pokémon and Pikmin remarked to the Associated Press that he “never said video games [are] an art.” In that post-show interview, he said that he was humbled to receive a fellowship that Alfred Hitchcock had once received, and according to the Associated Press, he then “batted away suggestions that his work was in the same category as a classic film.”

Now, that last quote belongs to the AP, not to Miyamoto himself. And it’s worth mentioning that none of this art talk was part of Miyamoto’s actual acceptance speech, which was more about his creative process and his history with Nintendo. “I’m receiving the award together with everyone who has worked with me in the past 30 years,” he said, “and I’d like to thank each one of those people for their hard work.”

Here is a man who is way too busy making art to bother defining it.

And really, his comments to the AP might say more about the man than the medium. Overwhelming humility is Miyamoto-san’s calling card: “I cannot create games alone… I am rather embarrassed to receive such an award as a personal award,” he said during his acceptance speech. That kind of modesty seems to be a respectful, unpretentious man’s counter-weight to his own considerable status, not a comment on the aesthetic value of games as such. After all, in that same speech, Miyamoto says that Donkey Kong was “one of the first games created by artists and game designers” rather than “engineers.”

So sure, Miyamoto never said that video games are an art. But he did say that we should celebrate the role that games play “both in entertainment and in culture.” And he did refer to his colleges at Nintendo as “artists.” Besides which, he did devote 30 years of his life to game design, which he calls his dream job.  So are games art? It’s tempting to put Miyamoto down for a no on that question, but it’s more like his answer is that he’s too busy making games (and also, too damn humble) to care.

Two Interviews: Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games and Carlos Bordeu of ACE Team

So I’ve been doing some interviews for The Kartel, and if I do say so myself, they’ve been going quite well. Below you’ll find an audio interview with Supergiant Games’ Greg Kasavin (who game Bastion is out now) and ACE Team’s Carlos Bordeu (whose game Rock of Ages will be out next month).

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Fresh from the success of their unapologetically trippy first-person brawler Zeno Clash, ACE Team announced Rock of Ages, a “tower offence” game about arranging great works of art from five periods–Classical Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo, and Romanticism–and then crushing them with a giant boulder. Carlos Bordeu (the C in ACE Team) sat down with The Kartel to discuss the game’s art-history-by-way-of-Terry-Gilliam look, and how the team’s process has changed since Zeno Clash.

The Kartel: You’ve said that ACE Team was somewhat “unbalanced” while making Zeno Clash, with way more visual artists than programmers. Has the division of labor changed for Rock of Ages?

 
Carlos Bordeu: In a sense, the development of Rock of Ages tended to balance itself out since we moved from Valve’s Source Engine technology to Epic’s Unreal Engine which, being a different beast altogether, required our entire studio to be actively looking for ways to improve our processes and methods while distributing this knowledge with the rest of the team. Learning to maneuver in Unreal forced us to do many small-scale local tests for several parts of the game in order to get the best gameplay and graphical experience we could deliver.

In terms of our work force, we had a more balanced team. There were three programmers who worked onRock of Ages, instead of David alone who almost entirely had to make Zeno Clash for the PC.

TK: The visuals in Zeno Clash don’t look quite like anything else, but in Rock of Ages you’re explicitly working from the styles of other artists. Has that been an adjustment?

CB: The process itself involved doing a lot of research about artists and styles we are fond of and distilling what we consider the most valuable and in tune with our game vision and we go with it. However we do believe that a certain “ACE Team” style has been applied to the game overall, and we’ve not just simply tried to only reference the art periods. Certainly using classic art as a reference for the game has given us a chance to once again produce visuals not very commonly seen in videogames.

Come to think of it, Goya's paintings do kind of look like World 6 of Yoshi's Island.

TK: Did the chronological order of the game’s levels lend itself well to introducing new game mechanics, and to a difficulty curve?

CB: Although the main game concept consists of placing your defenses, and then going to destroy the opponent with your giant boulder, the game progression is set up to slowly introduce the the player to different defensive units to maintain the focus on learning new strategies while you advance.

The level design also plays a very big part of the game’s design. Some strategic units work extremely well on certain types of levels, but not so well on others. Not all the same units are available on all levels which means learning a specific strategy and repeating it for all the game will never work. The boss levels [such as the confrontation with Michelangelo's David in the original trailer] are also a pretty big deviation from the traditional gameplay during the campaign.

TK: Could you talk a bit about the story in the single-player campaign? How does the myth of Sisyphus figure in?

CB: To be quite honest, the story is quite *as Dr. Evil would say* inconsequential. It jumps from one place to the next in a very dreamlike fashion, always in the style of old Monty Python movies and Terry Gilliam short animations.

But yes… Videogames in general are about being resilient in the pursuit of a goal, which usually means doing the same thing over and over until you conquer it (a bit like the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill forever).

I think that we can all relate.

Zip It, Mundungus: On Adaptation and Omission

So I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books–and I know, I know, that makes me culturally illiterate–but nonetheless, I went ahead and saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1: The Fellowship of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And there’s this scene in which the not-actually-titular fellowship is about to move Harry to a safe-house, and there is serious planning afoot. And some guy we’ve never seen before says something sort of off-topic, to which Alastor Moody replies, “Zip it, Mundungus!”

“Who the fuck is Mundungus?” I whispered to the Potter-literate friend sitting to my left.

“Oh, he’s been in the series since about the fifth book,” he replied. “He’s… a problem.”

“Oh,” I said. “So was he played by a different actor in the other movies? I don’t recognize him.”

“Um,” he said. “No, he wasn’t in the other movies.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I guess this is how they’re introducing him.”

I really had no idea what to say, other than “They can’t do that,” which of course they can, because they did. But this was unconventional storytelling, to say the least, and it had to mean one of two things:

1. The Harry Potter movies are meant as addenda to the books, an understanding of the latter being prerequisite if the former is to make a lick of sense. In this case, the films strive to be well-made, but not autonomous.

2. The Harry Potter movies are cynical cash-grabs, defying all manner of screenwriting logic because the intended audience already knows the plot and, more to the point, will readily pay to see the films no matter how much they suck. In this case, it makes no difference whether or not the films are well-made; if the consumer doesn’t care, then why should the producer?

Whether Harry Potter 7-1 is a quirky adaptation full of fan service, or a half-assed adaptation full of profit-motivated contempt, the “Zip it, Mundungus” moment serves as a yardstick for what not to do when adapting a work from one medium to another. In short: You’ve got to be canny and decisive about what you choose to excise, and equally, about what you choose to leave in. If you’ve left a peripheral character out of six of your eight movies, then you can probably get by without him for the remaining two.

Countless adaptions have suffered from being excessively faithful to their source material. When Zack Snyder says that the length of each shot in his film version of Watchmen corresponds to the size of a panel from Alan Moore’s original comic–that’s bad. Just because it works on the page doesn’t mean that it will work on film; indeed, the pacing and structure of Watchmen are meant to be peculiar to comics, and thus untranslatable. If there are vital things from the book that refuse to work in a movie, then you either replace them with something that will work or, as Alan Moore famously counseled Terry Gilliam in regards to Watchmen, think hard about whether you should be making the movie in the first place.

Generally speaking, the best adaptations are the ones that boldly leave things out. The film version of Everything Is Illuminated wisely leaves out an entire parallel narrative from the book. Because those who want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book can read it, and those who want to watch Liev Schreiber’s film can watch it. One is a loving adaptation of the other, but they’re not one and the same, for goodness’ sake.

Even Peter Jackson’s massive adaptation of The Lord of the Rings leaves a fair amount out, as any Tom Bombadil fan will attest. And that trilogy would not have gained anything of value if Saruman, just before dying, had turned to our heroes and screamed, “Zip it, Bombadil!”

“Who the fuck is Tom Bombadil?” someone would have whispered to his slightly embarrassed, Elvish-speaking friend.

Come to Think of It, I Don’t Particularly Want to Play on Roger Ebert’s Lawn

I respect Roger Ebert for admitting that his argument about video games was profoundly stupid. There are two major reasons why Ebert’s original argument was invalid. He now freely admits the first and most important one–namely, that he was discussing a medium about which he knew next-to-nothing. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen,” he says. Amen.

His ignorance of the medium leads him to some truly bizarre conclusions. For example, consider this excerpt from his faux-debate with Clive Barker (who, incidentally, is an expert on video games like a a grizzly bear is an expert on veganism):

Barker: “Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.”

Ebert: “If you can go through ‘every emotional journey available,’ doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?”

The bit about doing Romeo and Juliet naked and upside down–simply put, that is not what games do. It’s more like what movies sometimes do. Interactivity does not allow the player to do whatever he wants. It allows the player to act in a very limited number of ways, within a closed system that is designed to lead him to a certain preconceived conclusion. Sometimes player-action is really no more based in choice than the act of turning a book’s pages: You can either turn the page and see what’s next, or you can put down the book and do something else.

Think of it this way: If you could do anything you wanted in Grand Theft Auto, then the ability to kill prostitutes would not be an ethical issue. Sure, you could kill prostitutes, but you could also drive them to the nearest community college and enroll them at your own expense, and on the way over, you could have a frank discussion with them about class privilege, gender inequality, and safe sex. You cannot discourse with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto, but you can kill them. The ethical problem in Grand Theft Auto is not that you can do anything, and that given that freedom, lots of people choose to kill prostitutes. The problem is that you can do relatively few things, and one of those few things that you can choose to do is kill prostitutes. The option is there because the designers put it there, and the alternative is absent because the designers didn’t put it there.

Even when games have branching narratives (and many do not), there are rarely more than two or three possible paths. And even the hundred-or-so important decisions in the Mass Effect games do not constitute anything approaching free choice. The experience still has an author.

To use Ebert’s own example, Braid:

You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

If he had played the game, which of course he has not, Ebert would know that Braid is specifically about the impossibility of taking back our mistakes. As the game builds toward its famous final level, time manipulation ceases to be an amusing superpower and becomes instead a tragic distortion of perspective: What if you thought, mistakenly, that you could bend the laws of nature to your will? What sorts of mistakes might you make as a result? You would probably make some pretty horrible ones, as the game intends to show you through an interactive–but fundamentally linear–narrative.

Similarly, what if you thought that video games were a space wherein you could do whatever you want, without limitation or consequence? What important things might you miss? You would probably miss the point entirely, as Barker and Ebert both do.

Reason Number Two:

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art.

If you have to reject something on “purely theoretical grounds,” even when that conclusion runs contrary to observation or common sense, then you’re either (a) working with a bad theory, or (b) being a sophist. The point of theory is to systematically explain real objects and actual experiences, not to trap us in snooty technicalities.

A simple example: Around the turn of the 20th Century, the general consensus was that photography and filming were technical operations rather than creative pursuits, and that photographs and films therefore did not count as art. Eventually, that theory was revised–specifically because people began to understand the medium, and the skill required to work in it, and the many subjective choices it involves–and it suddenly seemed silly and pointless to exclude photography and film from aesthetic discourse. The problem was the theory, not the thing being theorized.

“I concluded without a definition [of art] that satisfied me,” Ebert says, ending this discussion about what art is the only way that any discussion about what art is ever ends.

An Entirely Earnest Request to Roger Ebert

So Roger Ebert has said once again, in his patented get-off-my-lawn rhetorical register, that video games are not and can never be art. First of all, let me say that I honestly believe discussions over the definition of art to be, by their very nature, a complete waste of time.

As Ebert himself points out, the whole matter is one of self-importance rather than anything empirical or useful: “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” he asks.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

Likewise, if cinephiles wish to preserve a privileged space for their favored medium–cinema is better than television, celluloid is better than digital video, anything is better than video games–then let them go ahead and do so, if it makes them happy. I will not waste your time, or mine, by trying to wrestle with that ghettoizing impulse, or by rehashing my (readily available) argument as to why it simply does not matter whether such-and-such a thing is Art or not.

Instead, I would like to challenge Roger Ebert on a considerably more practical matter. Mr. Ebert, if you’re going to call Braid “pathetic,” as you do in the article that I have quoted above, then it really is quite essential that you actually play the fucking game.

To put it another way: I am not particularly fond of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. You, Roger Ebert, are. That’s fine. I’m sure that we could have an interesting discussion about our differences of opinion–but that discussion would only be possible because you and I have both seen the film.

It would be absurd for me to say that I didn’t like Mulholland Drive (let alone to say that the film is “pathetic”) if that opinion were based solely on hearing someone talk about it, or on viewing a few stills from it, rather than sitting down with the work and giving it a shot. Watching Kellee Santiago’s TED talk does not qualify you to form an opinion on Braid, any more than reading your review of Mullholland Drive would, in and of itself, qualify me to disagree with that review.

To be clear: I am not claiming that Braid is a perfect or unassailable work of art. The game is excellent, but it falls down in places (and interestingly enough, when it does fall down, it does so in a markedly David Lynch sort of way; Jonathan Blow, the game’s designer, has cited Mullholland Drive as an influence, and a little of Lynch’s petulant opacity shows through in Braid’s less successful moments). What I am arguing is simply that, until you actually experience Braid–not as the subject of a lecture, or as an aggregate of YouTube videos, but as a game, which is what it is–your qualitative claims about the game will be cranky, incendiary gibberish rather than criticism. (And here I’ve taken the bait. I’ve done what is referred to, in certain corners of the Internet, as feeding the troll).

If you seriously want to be part of the discourse on video games, then play some. Braid is about five hours long. You’ve spent far, far more time than that watching and writing about movies that you strongly disliked.

If you cannot be bothered to play any video games, then the topic at hand is one of which you are wholly ignorant. Casually dismissing an entire medium based on a small number of examples would be ridiculous enough–but when you haven’t even spent any time with those few examples, you’re just embarrassing yourself. Either form a valid, well-founded opinion, or proclaim your indifference and walk away.