Why Are There No Highbrow Video Games?

simoniker writes "In his latest 'Designer's Notebook' question, columnist Ernest Adams asks a very simple question: are video games' lack of cultural credibility partly due to the fact that "we don't have any highbrow games"? Titled 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?', Adams asks: 'Almost every other entertainment medium has an elite form... We produce light popular entertainment, and light popular entertainment is trivial, disposable, and therefore culturally insignificant, at least so far as podunk city councilors and ill-advised state legislators are concerned.' Do games have an image problem compared to other popular media, and how do we fix it?"

Comments

Re:Very simple answer

[garyok]

I'm sorry but this struck me as pretty silly. Mozart wasn't 'high-brow' (i.e. intellectually and asthetically sophisticated) because tickets cost a lot of money; he was, like Beethoven and especially Bach a musical genius who made sophisticated, complicated and beautiful musical constructions. That the people who were predisposed to like him were educated and therefore also predominantly wealthy (in order to get that education) is quite literally a coincidence, a correlation which you confused with causation.

So the order of events is...?

1. Mozart makes fancy music for fun.
2. Fancy people with money just happen to like Mozart's fancy music.
3. ???
4. Mozart profits!

Bollocks.

Mozart knew that

1. Rich people have money.
2. Rich people have egos and are used to paying flunkies to fluff their egos.
3. Rich people with inflated egos don't like what commoners like because they, the rich, are special. If they weren't special they'd be commoners and because they're not commoners they must be special. See how this works? So stuff that commoners can dig is way out.
4. Mozart could make a huge pile of cash being the best person in Europe at enabling the rich and fancy to demonstrate how special they are by them paying him fat wads of moolah to create fancy music. Music that they can brag to their rich, fancy mates about what rich, fancy patrons of the arts they are and all the fancy richers can pity the commoners for not understanding.

Your narrative is the one lacking a grounding in reality. And, just to prove that you have your head profoundly rammed up your own arse - so far that it defies logic and Euclidean space by actually poking out your own mouth:

That any Joe can pick up a Mozart CD does not mean any Joe can understand and appreciate said CD; music of all genres and categories requires an extant cultural setting and prior aesthetic vocabulary to be appreciated. But, any Joe with exposure and time may learn, like many people with a classical education already had an opportunity to do, to appreciate his works.

Let's leave the jaw-dropping condescension, pretension, and arrogance alone for a second and just concentrate on the fact that Mozart (on many occasions) produced works that the common folks of his time found instantly accessible and gratifying with no need for an extensive and expensive education to appreciate. The Magic Flute did not originally have an all-Smurf cast.

OK, time to wrap up:

1. From your own damning testimony you have adequately demonstrated that Average Joe is probably smarter than you.
2. He can probably kick your head in too.
3. You would probably do well to add that finishing sparkle to your education by learning to shut your noisehole.