/lit/ - Literature

>>10982160
again, though, this is all to sort of get at why there was so much earlier gushing over planescape, fallout, and ultima. because games - well, the games i like, anyways - always do have this question about violence in them, the meaning of violence and this ongoing aspect of increased immersion, aestheticization, spetacularization.

so why is it then that they also contain within them - the good ones, the really really good ones - these lyrical meditations on the meaning of all of this violence? it's because great auteurs in any medium bring this irreducibly literary dimension to what they are working with. the far cry games pretty much always now have interesting endbosses who are absolutely aware of the conspicuous consumption of violence that makes a first-person shooter attractive. they all do it.

girard didn't live to see the era of videogames, but the question of violence and spectacle in gaming is a legit fascinating topic. games aren't like movies like this, you can't really be a passive spectator in quite the same way...although the more virtual virtual reality becomes the more the gap between the map and the territory becomes effaced.

even games like fortnite or PUBG are pretty close to being a completely hygenicized versions of the actual *film* Battle Royale, which is imho the most goddamn terrifying horror film of the modern era. it's almost a satire of our culture's own already bizarre tendency to want to watch other humans get chopped up by monsters and aliens. for all kinds of reasons. but mainly to try and make sense of the meatbag condition.

i thought ward's essay was pretty dope tho. and listening to the painful harris/klein podcast just tells me that we are, as ward says, entering a post-secular age. i think that's entirely apt. it's the enlightenment under review, the skepticism about skepticism, postmodernity flipped inside out, and totally revealing in terms of the flash-points of the new culture wars that seem to be everywhere these days. we get our politics wrapped up with our post-secular religious tendencies.

and it becomes these chimerical questions designed to inflame. which is better: equality or inequality? discuss!!!

and the wasteland grows, incredibly, in the midst of the most superabundantly luxurious civilization the world has ever seen.