ProfRichards

Fascinating! Thank you!

There are some excellent analytical points in this piece. The ending, pivoting from fun to meaning, seems to be the thesis about art. Outer Wilds is a great case in point. Is it fun to wait for the sand to drain on Ash Twin to access the warps? Nope. But while you wait, you watch. You hear. You get zapped by the sand column because you under estimated your distance. But that communicates something deeper than fun.

I love this piece, as I am passionate about archiving games and game experiences. We need more lending libraries that stock old hardware (and adapters) so people can re experience these cultural artifacts. We keep them alive by playing. And while emulators are a stop-gap, they don’t replace the material experience of holding specific controllers, waiting for load times and the embodied experience of games.

A lovely meditation! Thank you for writing this piece. That said, I understand simulacra and Plato’s allegory of the cave differently. Plato’s allegory is that all of human’s experiences of “reality” are reflections and not objective materiality. Simulacra is yet another (!!) layering of meditation caused by Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction. So films like The Matrix and Inception mediate on a nostalgic and ideological notion of “reality” and never really go far enough to show the absurdities of assuming reality is stable or fixed. There is no unitary reality. Right?