The other day my friend @cigumo sent me this quote, which was part of an article  posted to Play This Thing:

“Game” is a term that obscures the stark potential of this form, it
sells the world on childish entertainments while delivering the most
potent mechanism of mind control ever conceived.

What else do you call the capacity to develop something in five weeks that results in an average of dozens of hours of compulsive clicking
from tens of millions of people?

I think that’s a negative way to put it, and the mechanicist point of view is nothing to call home about.

Suspension of disbelief has always been the whole point behind works of art, very long before -even thousands of years before-  Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term.

How long does it take a musician pro to compose a song?  How many hum and headbang to that song?
Not to mention how many will dance to it.

Or even further… how does a good cinema auteur manipulate emotions?
How does she transmit a profound philosophical conundrum, or the author in a novel manages to make you ‘feel it’, more than lending it to intellectualisation?

Time is in such cases quite an irrelevant variable, the most surprising thing is not the ability of videogames to cause effects on people (nor that of any other fine arts, for that matter).
The real interesting thing is man’s abilities to create his own experience through information bits projected on his senses.

Hamlet and Horatio at the Graveyard

That’s who we are. Amazingly powerful, autonomous self-replicant machines with amazing information processing power.

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! — Hamlet (Act II, Scene II)   W.S.

Arts are a part of who we are and it’s up to us to refine our senses, and our appreciation skills to achieve the best of our potential, there’s nothing special about videogames, other than a remarkable ability in some of the artists who create them to achieve something closer to the grial of suspension of disbelief.

Having dominated the physical world that surrounds us, man looks to dominate himself and to create his own novel experiences outside of the physical world.

That’s actually the amazing thing:  the real beauty of man striving to rethink himself, so that he can recreate himself.

In his own image.