A lot of what
you get out of a movie depends on what intention you bring to the
viewing experience. You can go to a movie just as escapism — and be
swept up by the visions and emotions, or whatever. Or you can attend a
movie with a more expansionist mindset: you want to experience those
same visions and emotions, but you’re doing it to connect those things
to the rest of your life, to bring them back; not to escape from the
rest of your life. The goal is, maybe, to expand yourself into perhaps
a greater, more experienced person. Even just a little bit.
Dogs
play-fight because it gives them the experience to fight more
effectively when they need to really-fight. etc. So this isn’t some
quirk of human-exclusive behavior I am talking about.
Games
can provide this kind of mental, emotional and spiritual expansion, and
they can push it in a different direction than movies, or books, or
music, or whatever. In his new book "Persuasive Games," Ian Bogost
coins the term “procedural rhetoric” to talk about one of the core
qualities of games: that they communicate ideas via the way things
work, through behavior. I think that is sort of the right idea, but I
think the “rhetoric” part is somewhat the wrong idea. I think the
richest things that games have to show us are sub-verbal, maybe even
sub-intellectual.
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