Here is an interesting and well-written article by John Lanchester about Video Games in the 1/1/2009 issue of the London Review of Books, covering ground I am not familiar with, and highlighting the fact that 2008 was the year in which the UK market for video games is forecast to have overtaken that for music and video combined (it overtook that for books in 2007). Excerpt:
"There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar."
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