A speech I gave: "Video Games: The New Gesamtkunstwerk"

[Original_Name]

Hey there, everybody! I've been using these forums forever, and after giving this speech I realized just how many of the ideas I used were formulated through conversations that I had here. I thought this would give me an interesting opportunity to have a more warm, personal conversation with you guys about the kinds of things that I always talk about on here.

This was a nothing-grade speech that I threw together rather quickly, which will serve as my excuse for the abundance of "um"s, total overuse of the term "dynamic", and hurried sections with at least one misused quotation (the guy kept bugging me about how much time I had left and distracted me, so my apologies go out to Henry Jenkins for inadvertently warping the meaning of his quote).

The aim of the speech was to be "Motivational" and incite a "Call to Arms" -- I sort of took a bizarre approach to that (as I mention at the very beginning of my speech), but people seemed to really enjoy it in any case. Anyway, here ya' go, Racketeers!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSDmuXcp ... e=youtu.be

[jfrost]

Well, I for one did enjoy it. Well done.

[puke_face]

Very good speech. I have never heard of the game seaman up until now, haha.

[Original_Name]

Thanx, guys!

Oh wow, you'd never heard of Seaman? I was wishing that I had had longer to speak -- I really had to fly through the Seaman portion faster than the audience's brains were able to keep up with. It's one of my all-time favorite video games, despite the fact that most people wouldn't feel like it fulfills the expectations that they come to a video game for -- it's not really what you would call "fun", but it's extremely interesting. It just pulverizes the fourth wall so mercilessly that from a conceptual design standpoint I'm totally stunned at how impossibly new it is, even over a decade later.

[J T]

It was nice to actually see you speak the kinds of things we see you type about here. I guess it adds to that "synaesthesia" you were describing.

I like the way you brought in Wagner's ideas because I think they greatly apply. I think this is where most of us really see that there is great potential in videogames as an artform. They can be that Gesamtkunstwerk (not that I had ever heard that word before), but it's true that if we are to accept music, visual artistry, writing, and kinaesthetic movement as artforms, then it only stands to reason that if all those elements are combined into a videogame that we would also consider the game an artform if it somehow combines those other artistic elements into an interactive gestalt that is more than the sum of its parts.

[Original_Name]

J T! I was legitimately excited to see a response from my fellow stalwart of the "Games as Culture" forum when I posted this, glad to see you showed up!

Yes, I have to say, I feel like I stumbled upon something that could really resonate amongst skeptics with the Gesamtkunstwerk connection. Had I had more time I might have been able to elucidate the point further in the video, but I made pretty quick ground there anyway since Belmont has a pretty heavy musical emphasis. But yes, I feel like pointing to a tradition of "spectacle" in the arts really gives the medium a canon. But if I were to really go all the way with the topic, the invigorating thing about video games is that they don't merely carry the torch of the existing arts up to this point -- the advent of interactivity EXPANDS our definition of what a work of art can be. I could go on about this stuff forever.