Susan Sontag on maturity and yet another stupid suit against videogames

Click the title for the stupid lawsuit. Another family of murder victims wants to blame the makers of GTA for a fucked-up kid going on a murderous rampage to the tune of 600 million. Call me a cynic, but it sounds like money-grubbing whores to me.

and the Sontag quote is taken from her book Regarding the Pain of Others:

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hand-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.

Oh, back to videogames for a second. Several months back on Roger Ebert's site rogerebert.suntimes.com there was a debate going on about whether video games should be considered as art. Not surprisingly, a lot of gamers said yes, movie critics said no. I've been thinking about the purpose of art a lot lately as I'm finishing my master's degree, and I've decided that art, to really be art, must reveal something to us about the world we didn't see before--whether about the human condition or the natural world. It should raise questions, not provide the answers, and ultimately it should make us look at ourselves in a new way; it should humble us.

Videogames do not do this, but I think that they could. It's still a relatively new form of entertainment, and tends to be pitched at youth rather than us old folk, which is really what's holding it back. I think, however, this might be changing. Nintendo is starting to redefine the way we play games, and Japan in general is known for coming up with some of the most creative concepts to base games upon. In fact I consider GTA a step in the right direction because it's a sort of exaggerated examination of the world we live in, and most people (I think) see the game with some sense of irony rather than as an example of reality. It doesn't explore the ramifications of the protagonist's behavior, but the risk is death or arrest--does that need to be examined very deeply?

There have been games that try to simulate the sensation of being on drugs, but that could never work on the player without some sort of direct sensory interface for us to attach our brains to, and even then I have my doubts. No, I think we still have a ways to go before videogames could be considered art. There might be art within the game, but to see the game itself as art? Not yet. (I don't think The Sims is art, either--it's just a big experiment) Anyone have suggestions for what games ought to be considered art?