selectparks - Games-Language: An Interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin'' by Cicero

Cicero Inacio da Silva: You have recently edited a book on new media, story and games. Why are you interested in games? NWF: I would say, for a couple reasons. I think that in a fundamental level, playing games, performing for each other, telling each other stories and poems, are deep human activities. All these activities have come in the digital media, in one way or another, and I wanted to create a book where people who were thinking about all of this would be in one context, and could actually respond to each other - so we can start to, through that dialog, think about the field in a broader way. This is part of the motivation. But another motivation was that, although I think this is changing, there is a sense that games were a kind of the Other, the separate thing in digital media. Games were very successful commercially, but very uninteresting from an artistic point of view, from a scholarly point of view. So I also wanted to challenge that a little bit and say: "Yes, games are one of the most popular forms of digital media, but they are also interesting art work, interesting writing, and this is happening and is related to games, and I think that scholars and artists have to contribute to our discussion about making and criticizing games." Read full interview at networked_performance http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/001075.html