/lit/ - Literature

>>12377074
i think really you answered your own question: 'interesting and unsettling.' he is indeed those things. i don't expect my philosophers to be saints or paragons of virtue; just that they be interesting. where else can you read videogame criticism that references Heraclitus and Baudrillard?

and besides, sometimes being unsettled is good. certainly it's not unlike my own fascination with Land, who i have angered several of my friends by talking about constantly. he tends to unsettle (or even downright anger) a lot of people. and i am often asked, why the fuck am i obsessing over such a nightmarish vision of what philosophy is? the answer, i suspect, is that it has something much more to do with *me* than with acceleration itself. it doesn't so much give me the answers about the questions i am asking as it does present newer and more interesting questions to meditate on. and in meditating on those questions i eventually discover more about what my original fascinations were.

icycalm is a genuine original. say what you will about him, he doesn't *diminish your appreciation for art.* if there is one thing he is exceedingly good at, it is dismantling kitsch snobbery. his polemic against indie games (or the Arcade Culture essay in general) was an interesting early warning shot about what was coming down the pipe: namely, Morality Creep. we should be able to say Bad Art Sucks, and not justify crappy games on the basis of "message" alone. why not? and yet he's not purely an apologist for big-budget Hollywood stuff either; lots of games have huge production budgets and lack any sense of what to actually do with them.

he's a genuine original. i'm less interested in vidya now than i was before, but for exposing the secret necessity for Nightmare Mode in 21C spectacle, and even finding his own way to the Eternal Recurrence by way of Far Cry 2? come on, if you can't appreciate that, there's something wrong with you. he has a very fine antenna for sniffing out *cynicism,* which is a rare gift.