“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

—Homer, The Iliad (via corrumpo)

Returning to the Videogames as Art debate, and the Is Roger Ebert Getting Senile debate, my friend Q recommended the above video.

I have seen it and often prefer to think about modern games as much more artistic than the 8-bit era, though you can certainly see some of the earliest examples of the form taking shape in this video. You can also see (in some clips more than others) vast amounts of potential being poured into very limited hardware, and wonder what some of these programmers might make today (if they are retired, some probably still design I’m sure.)

Recently Journey was released and is currently being hailed as one of the greatest artistic achievements in all of gaming.

Then you have others like Bioshock, which turns glam to horror in a beautiful way:

So I think it is an interesting time to be alive… to have played the original Mario on NES, to Mechwarrior and Tie Fighter on PC, to Red Dead Redemption and Dead Space on PS3… we are watching the very early years of a form with nearly limitless potential!

“Some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone. Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts — he becomes a different person, and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.”

—

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

He wrote a short series to Esquire, linked above, about his own struggles with ego, success, despair, and the eventual abandonment of it all. Fascinating, and it makes me think I ought to revisit some of his fiction.