B) Invoking Sturgeon’s Revelation also proves Geldingman wrong. Yes, 90% of video game writing is crud, as is 90% of every other form of entertainment out there. To say that games should be more like art house films because than they’d be “good” is ignoring the fact that even independent films, on average, suck. If you don’t believe me, go look up the oeuvre of Coleman Francis.

Probably. I don’t mean to riff on game writers specifically, but just bad writing – which is present everywhere, including in the art house movies Gleiberman probably masturbates to at home. I’m not suggesting that you or any of your past or present colleagues belong in that camp. Hell, I love you guys. We were just talking about it today. But the vast majority is pretty bad, a correct conclusion Gleiberman arrives at with bullshit reasoning. It’s like arresting a black spree shooter because he’s black, instead of because he’s busy gunning down people at the mall: sure, you did the right thing, but you did it for all the wrong reasons.

My question though is…is stupid stuff like this from linear media relevant enough to respond to?

Honestly, those who don’t understand video games aren’t bound to be a major force in society. It’s a little like realistic painters complaining about the impressionists, no?

It’s more like having your career dismissed by someone so out of touch that he makes references to realists vs. impressionists. (I’m unnecessarily mean on account of my upbringing).

But seriously, it’s so easy to call a guy a pretentious douchebag on my website that I might as well. It’s even easier than posting a comment. Anybody whose opinion is worth anything is going to recognize the guy’s not worth listening to, but it’s still one more bit of nonsense that anybody working in games has to put up with. Especially when it’s coming from Entertainment Weekly, which assumes that “Grey’s Anatomy” is something that warrants extensive coverage, but videogame releases only warrant a half-page every few months or so.

Basically, I’ll be happy when people don’t respond to that with “He’s a douchebag, but you do have to admit that a lot of game writing sucks…” and instead just respond with “He’s a douchebag.”

“Game design is indeed an art in and of itself, but it’s not “meaningful” except on an academic level.”

What was that all about? However, this guy does in fact seem to be a major tool. My question though is…is stupid stuff like this from linear media relevant enough to respond to?

Honestly, those who don’t understand video games aren’t bound to be a major force in society. It’s a little like realistic painters complaining about the impressionists, no?

It would be like sneering at all screenwriters because of Avatar, or all film critics because Pruane2Forever exists. A lot of people, myself included, have pointed out that there’s plenty of weak writing in videogames. What Gleiberman has done is shown a mocking contempt for an entire career based on his own pretentious, ignorant, and outdated assumptions about a medium.

But of course, I’m the guy who thinks “eat a dick” is showing the guy more respect than he deserves.

I’m not going to defend Mr. Gleiberman, but he raises one valid point: most video game writing *is* terrible. On the other hand, so is most writing for any other medium, even if the amount of crap churned out by those is a little less than what games fling around.

Gleiberman’s not really someone you should roll your eyes over, though. I just find it cute and ironic that someone who decries “writing” in games as being the natural evolution of the “rich” tradition of 20th Century art (which, let me remind you, produced masterpieces such as Howard the Duck, Caligula, and the profound Andy Warhol vehicle Sleep) can write this:

You can make a case that Rohmer was the one and only giant of the art-house-renaissance era who didn’t experience a creative falling off after the ’60s and ’70s. That may, in part, be the prejudice of my own experience

Maybe you can, or maybe he can, make a case – it all depends on what part of the paragraph you look at. I guess the chunk of Gleiberman’s brain responsible for writing the beginning of sentence one wasn’t in communication with the part responsible for writing the end of sentence two. That doesn’t really condemn his writing to the, uh, dirty trenches of the Avatar-liking, game-playing common man, but his attitude peppers it with delicious, degrading mouthfuls of irony.

I can sum-up his stance in one sentence, based on this, as well as his “lone man” comment from earlier:

I first really discovered Rohmer in the ’80s, with films like the sun-dappled erotic roundelay Pauline at the Beach (1983), pictured above, and the great Summer (1986), the story of a woman, single and isolated and doomed to taking a summer vacation by herself, who is so transcendently neurotic that she brings off the singular feat of spending an entire movie talking in eloquent deluded circles around her own loneliness.

The thing is, she sounds like a real person, and that was the glory of Rohmer’s poetically prosaic conversational movies. Hooked on films like Summer, I went back and saw the movies that made Rohmer famous, the six “Moral Tales” he wrote and directed in the ’60s and ’70s, and though I found them tricky and marvelous and, in their way, quite sexy (what is Claire’s Knee but the story of a man having an obsessive, lustful affair — yet doing it so chastely that he triumphs over his own desire), to me they had less of that luxuriously digressive talky flow than his later films, which elevated dialogue into pure brainy deceptive play

What he’s probably trying to say is he’d like to see games do an artsy sun-dappled erotic roundelay about a girl doomed to spend her summer vacation alone, and then a bunch of insults at game “writers”. That, or he wants more French people being lusty and having sex, except now with interactivity. You can interpret that any way you want to.

Gleiberman’s not really someone you should roll your eyes over, though. I just find it cute and ironic that someone who decries “writing” in games as being the natural evolution of the “rich” tradition of 20th Century art (which, let me remind you, produced masterpieces such as Howard the Duck, Caligula, and the profound Andy Warhol vehicle Sleep) can write this:

Maybe you can, or maybe he can, make a case – it all depends on what part of the paragraph you look at. I guess the chunk of Gleiberman’s brain responsible for writing the beginning of sentence one wasn’t in communication with the part responsible for writing the end of sentence two. That doesn’t really condemn his writing to the, uh, dirty trenches of the Avatar-liking, game-playing common man, but his attitude peppers it with delicious, degrading mouthfuls of irony.

I can sum-up his stance in one sentence, based on this, as well as his “lone man” comment from earlier:

What he’s probably trying to say is he’d like to see games do an artsy sun-dappled erotic roundelay about a girl doomed to spend her summer vacation alone, plus a bunch of insults.