Bathroom Monologue: Are Videogames Art? Listing Curiosities

-The Mona Lisa never got a DLC Weapons Pack.

-A boy who spends all day reading literary fiction is attractive to girls. If he spends all day playing Braid, they wonder if he’s a hair stylist.

-Activision was making an action shooter game set in the infamous Fallujah conflict before public outcry made them cancel it. We have already seen several thriller movies set in the Iraq War.

-You can major in Southern Literature at college. You can talk about how JRPGs are too effeminate on a forum.

-Google “women authors” and there is only one picture of a naked lady. Google “women actors” and about half of the images show skin or are deliberately sexual in some way. Google “women videogames” and nearly every image is sexualized. There is also the image of a topless male action figure.

-There are hackneyed novelizations of movies. There are hackneyed videogame tie-ins of movies.

-Once I took a friend to see The Grudge. She curled into the fetal position in her chair and bravely watched the entire movie. Once I subjected the same friend to play Silent Hill 2. She made it across the introductory parking lot, where nothing happens, before throwing down the controller and screaming in fear that she could not do this anymore.

-There are a great number of metafictional novels. There are very few games about game theory.

-Director Guillermo Del Toro collaborated with Chuck Hogan to write The Strain, a trilogy of novels about vampires. Peter Jackson collaborated with Michel Ancel to make the King Kong videogame.

-With a pen and paper you can write a screenplay. With a digital camera you can shoot an indy film. With Sony’s Little Big Planet you can design your own levels. With Microsoft’s Kinect, you can paint on the television screen just by waving your hands.