If you want to better
understand the cross-cultural elements of what makes good games good, of what makes art art, then this article by Denis
Dutton of The Australian requires your attention. It's not your typical light web fare, so print it out and
spend some time on it; we promise that you'll emerge with new thoughts on our own little bit of turf here in gamedom.
A sampling of particularly evocative quotes:
- "Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today."
- "The rehearsal of dangers and conflicts in fiction is a way of learning about the world without having to take actual risks. Those of our ancestors who derived pleasure from fictional "practice" for real life gained an evolutionary edge: they were better prepared to deal with the real world as they found it."
- "There is a tendency ... for all artistic genres to develop in the direction of greater emotional content in time. Music moves from baroque to classic to romantic.... Movies go from merely illustrating stories to becoming more graphically exciting. These patterns toward increasing violence and emotional content can be put down largely to satiation: the process by which we simply get tired of anything we consume and crave more excitement from it."
