Why Weird Games Are Important - “Fengxi”
A common misconception of videogames is to mistake the entirety of the medium for the most prominent commercial products. This is understandable given the omniprevalence of Grand Theft Auto billboards and stores filled with tantalizing packages for younger siblings and cousins to while their summers away as grim space marines. Even the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of video games features the omnipresent commercially successful visages such as Pac Man. But a large part of this misperception is owing to the way that the mainstream video game media has functioned as a PR wing of the game industry, obscuring anything that pushes back against commercialist understandings of the medium. Blogger Fengxi’s forceful essay “Why Weird Games” goes even further, insisting that the language and form of the conversation around games gets constrained by the way these spaces avoid critiques (or at least skeptical views) of the focus on sales and consumer culture. Indeed, Fengxi’s argument is that we can only being to understand the scope of the medium, and build a vocabulary for discussing it as people, not simply consumers, through sustained exploration of weird, artistic, inscrutable, and challenging games.
Author: Fengxi
Link: https://critical-proximity.com/2014/03/16/why-weird-games-are-important/
Connections:
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer - “The Culture Industry”
Susan Sontag - Notes on Camp