This Op-Doc from the New York Times called, Games You Can’t Win by David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall was by far the darkest thing that I have had to write about in this class. While many aspects of the article and video were very poignant, what called me from the page was, “While their reasons for creating these games vary, one element clearly unites these developers: the video game is their chosen artistic medium, and programming is their paintbrush.” Upon first reading this the comparing of these dark video games to art really surprised me and I felt as though it was an unjust comparison. How were these dark and upsetting video games anything compared to a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that hangs in the most famous museums in the world or even a piano piece written by a child? When the authors of the article portion of the Doc-Ed opened up with the line, “Video games are generally associated with guns and explosions — a medium better suited to escapism than intimacy” I got the impression that the authors felt videogames were just a game that teenage boys played and one that they did not deem held any other merits other then to express pent up aggression. As a senior in high school, brother spends more time playing on his XBOX then he does with my parents, a fact that I am sure many sisters of teenage brothers would corroborate. It was weird for me to think that his controlling an animated football player to run up and down an animated football field or defending an animated country in animated war was art. Once I watched the video and saw the plight and trauma that the three experiences caused on the four people highlighted in the documentary, I understood why someone, like the animated football maker or animated war maker, would want their story told in a way that instead of reading it as a book or hearing it as a song or viewing it hanging on the wall, could be felt and seen step by step in a video game. As hard as it would be to watch and to play a “game” that can not be won and demonstrates a sex change or living with a child with terminal cancer, it is a way to convey every emotion and the feeling of a never ending struggle just like Basquiat conveyed on canvas or the way the Coronation of Napoleon tells a story hinging in the Louvre. Why is it that people, like I was, are turned off by the idea of immersing themselves in a game about a child dying from terminal cancer but could stare at a paining of mass annihilation or a traumatic event in history for hours in awe?
Osit, David, and Malika Zouhali-worrall. “Games You Can’t Win.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2016. Web. 18 Apr. 2016.
I’m really proud of the way that I wrote this CRQ. I did not like the article because it was so dark and depressing but I am proud that I was able to put feelings aside and respond to the article in the best way I knew how.