a follow-up on the preceding post

Not sure why I’m in such a blogging mood this afternoon/evening… Maybe because I’ve finished my most urgent tasks and the next set won’t become urgent for some days yet. (God bless the School of Sciences and Engineering for inviting me to observe their annual retreat this weekend. Not only do their recent successes have much to teach us, but the retreat is in Alexandria, of all places. And not only is it in Alexandria, but it’s going to be held in a hotel on the grounds of the Montazeh Palace, a gorgeous public park on the waterfront carved out of ex-King Farouk’s pre-Revolutionary property. And better yet, my birthday is the day after it ends, so I can just stay up in Alex for that, as I would have chosen to do anyway.)

But back to the topic…

I once heard the interesting remark about music that music moves from popular toward art when it changes from dance music into listening music. For rock music, the Sgt. Pepper’s album is sometimes described as a breakthrough album insofar as you can’t really dance to it. The thought is somewhat silly.

Electronic music has already chewed into the edges of a similar process. You can’t really dance to Amon Tobin, for instance, or at least it would look stupid. I can’t imagine dancing to Burial’s music either (what a weird dance party that would be).

On a related note, my undergraduate music teacher said (probably correctly) that Debussy’s great innovation was to remove the practical function of 7th chords. In previous tonal classical music, the 7th chord was played only to set the stage for the return of the dominant. In Debussy, the 7th becomes free-floating and atmospheric, pointing to nothing, with no resolution.

This suggests the general thesis that all the arts may evolve by gradually discarding the various practical functions found their genres and turning former tools into the things themselves. For instance, color changes from being a practical means of depicting solid entities into being the very subject of art itself in some modern painters, etc.

So, what would the equivalent be for videogames? What would turn videogames, incontrovertibly into high art? What would be the Sgt. Pepper’s album of videogames?

Bogost’s thoughts on this would be more interesting and informed than mine. But allow me to hypothesize that as dancing is to rock music, so is player control to videogames. In other words, the “practical” function of videogames is to let the player enjoy a test of personal skill, solve puzzles, rise to the level of challenges, etc. But what if all personal control were removed, and the spectacle of animated characters moving around on a screen, beyond the player’s control, became an end in itself? That’s what I think I was hoping for as a teenager when I so often let the computer play the games for me, as I just sat and watched, hypnotized.