Trigger Happy
affected by videogames in one way or another. Even if you’ve never played Tomb Raider, you can’t escape the clutches of Lara Croft.
People are always loath to admit that something new can approach the status of art. Take this rather aggressive ejaculation: “A pastime of illiterate, wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution.” Such high moral bile is typical of the attacks on videogames today.
But this sentence wasn’t written about videogames; it was written seventy years ago by French novelist Georges Duhamel, about the movies. Yet today, few people would argue that filmmaking is not an art form. An art form that is dependent on new technology always makes some people uneasy. The German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno expressed his wariness of jazz (dependent on a recently invented instrument, the saxophone, as well as emerging recording technologies) in similar terms during his correspondence with philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin.
Videogames today find themselves in the position that the movies and jazz occupied before World War II: popular but despised, thought to be beneath serious
31
