Energy Flush

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.newstatesman.com/music/2009/05/culture-technology-energy-rave

I was going to do an FT post on this but my day is filling up rapidly so I thought I'd throw it to the wolves here instead.

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

1. yeah it's a pity how his claims for "an energy crisis in culture" are based on-- the feeling that dance music these days is too easy to relate back to dance music ten years ago (which is his stock in trade! "the fact that i can do what i always do means that culture is dead!!").
(I don't know much about northern soul, particularly, but was that part of an energy crisis in culture? cos as far as i'm aware that actually used records from the previous decade, rather than records that are not unimaginable given the sounds of the previous decade. but no-one talks about it as a crisis of creativity, as the loss of youth's energy)

2. there is a whole other rest of culture, mister punk! you could actually have *bolstered* your argument by talking about videogames in a grumpy-old-man way! (i mean really aren't most videogames just doing things we could have imagined them doing in the nineties?? is this because the youth have no-- imagination??)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think gaming & interactivity in general is the biggest counter-argument, given that his piece is all about detecting tech shift through textural rupture. But I don't really know anything about gaming.

[cis.livejournal.com]

from what i've read i think gaming would be not a counter-argt but a definite backup! petronia explains it a lot better than i could.

though maybe k-punk would be against gaming anyway as even the super interactive stuff is still pretty top-down (it's a lot harder to go out and make your own mmorpg! unless you do it the old-fashioned way).

[cis.livejournal.com]

and by old-fashioned i mean 'retro': you can go out and make yr own text-adventure game or MOO very easily but it's a self-conscious act of revivalism, it's like making a typewriter-and-glue fanzine, or like making compilation tapes with actual c90s, it's not where the kids are at.

still on Swiss time

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I have seen exactly this argument being made based on the fact that CG improvements to video games now feel incremental rather than disruptive, or rather have passed the threshhold where they change the experience appreciably as the 2D to 3D shift did. (Actually, I would argue even this - like FF7 introduced cinematic storytelling bits to RPGs, say, but it's just cinematic storytelling i.e. mini-movies. And gameplay-wise 2D has always faked the 3D experience rather passably when it wanted to, because Western civ has about 500 years of experience in that as well.) But obviously all that means is that improvements are coming from elsewhere, eg. Wired's idea of "crowdsourcing" puzzle games i.e. building in the concept of player-compiled online walkthroughs by introducing RL or geo-based keys, which is as it should be.

Re: still on Swiss time

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

that's a nice point about games and user-defined evolution of them online. these concepts are fascinating and do make up for what turned me off games generally some ten years ago.