That John Lanchester fellow has written yet another interesting article in the LRB, this time not about the economic crisis (or so it seems to me), but about the medium that this year
[f]rom the economic point of view… overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.)
The industry is, of course, video games, and the article, similar in spirit to a less-well-written offering in Prospect Magazine six months back (to which I have now cancelled my subscription, and not to be confused with the in-house magazine of the Western Australian government’s Department of Industry and Resources), strikes exactly the right balance between outsider’s whimsy (for Lanchester is not what he would consider a gamer) and enthusiastic respect. Hence the marvellously-deadpan description:
Also great fun is Super Mario Kart, a racing game, again silly, with a highly welcome low level of pick-up-and-play difficulty. In it, Donkey Kong (a large gorilla) can race Princess Peach (the multiply kidnapped sort of love object of the Mario series), an Italian plumber (the eponymous Mario), his evil twin, Wario, and a small green dinosaur called Yoshi, and so on, all of the vehicles being driven by various friends and family members, and comprehensible and playable by anyone over the age of about four.
There are plenty of rule-of-thumb dichotomies too:
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience.
…
A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work.
Both useful insights, worth mentioning to anyone you know who has never played a computer game in their life and would like to understand how commentary on them has evolved from the glorious 1990s-era debates about children being brainwashed.
Letters to Nature 
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