From Pong to Red Dead Redemption : The New Yorker

this blog post at the new yorker links off to several earlier articles about games in context and analysis of culture and current events:

Back Issues: From Pong to Red Dead Redemption : The New Yorker.

it is an added value post to accompany this recent piece by nicholson baker where he, as an established and mature writer, discusses his impressions and observations of entering the world of video games for the first time.  here’s a pull quote from the article abstract:

The writer, who had never held a video-game controller until last fall, describes his experience playing a series of video games, sometimes alone and sometimes with his sixteen-year-old son. The first thing he learned is that video games—especially the vivid, violent ones—are ridiculously hard to play. They’re humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over. To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, climb, crawl, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet. The second thing the writer learned about video games is that they are long. Playing one game is not like watching one ninety-minute movie; it’s like watching one whole season of a TV show—and like watching it in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration. If you’re good, it might take you fifteen hours to play a typical game.