Culture, you ninny!

Hey, now I'm mad at culture, too...
You know what I'm talking about. That council of experts that all sit down together every Friday around a big conference table and decide what is and what isn't art this week. You all know they exist, don't kid yourselves.

Apparently games are not art yet. Yes, they've gone a long way since, say, the 80s, or since LucasArts - which used to have the name, the essence but not the "social acceptance", where anyone but us geeks were concerned - last made something worth mentioning. But they're still not seen as "art" by those that matter. The essence of Academia doesn't seem to care, at least not yet.

Than just finished Half Life 2's first episode. Yeah, apparently those expansions are serialised now. And they're damn fine in every respect, and even I can tell, being the non-"real"-gamer that I am these days. It seemed like... well, I won't say "like an interactive movie". I won't even say "like a good interactive movie", or something as crass as "a milestone in gaming's storytelling evolution". It's all that, but it is, truly, and most importantly, more. It's a game that makes you realise what games were meant for: communication, with the people who made the game, and with the game itself. Like "real" art.

And what makes me mad, this time, is that noone is there to look at it and tell the world why it's important, sociologically, and why mankind is richer for it. And not just this game, which caught my attention this time, mind you. I'm talking about games in general, the kind we play and make us feel... richer for it.
No courses out there teaching people how to make a brilliant game, what it takes to provide us with such an experience. No books, no magazines, other than the ones that would make money from advertising the games in the first place.

Yeah, I'm doing Film Studies, and films have been around... well, much longer than I have. Can we only examine things that retrospectively? I remember being told, time and time again, when I was younger, that we live in a fast-paced time where social evolution is concerned. And I believed them back then, but I really doubt them right now. I should probably have waited a few decades before believing anything I heard about the "here and now" - it seems like we have to make sure, before talking about things, that the "here and now" is safely buried as the "then and there".