and he doesn’t like denim!
Actually, he does have some good points about how Americans are
slovenly and don’t dress properly. People in Kazakhstan are horrified
to see Americans in jeans and dirty sneakers (what! you don’t polish
your black leather shoes three times a day!!!!). I am always a little
surprised by the number of people that come to the legislature to
testify in committee in jeans and casual clothes. I love casual
office wear and comfortable clothes, but a lot of people in America
really have lost the ability to dress properly based on the occasion.
And considering how little most Americans read, know about history,
(non-pop) music, and culture, maybe George Will does have a point
about connection between the lazy appearance and worst instincts of
Americans.
But George Will definitely paints with too broad a brush when he
brings in gamers:
“Seventy-five percent of American ‘gamers’ — people who play video
games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote.”
I play “video games”, but I am perfectly able to wear a suit to work,
dress in clothes other than jeans, and be an informed citizen and
voter. I assume he is exaggerating for satirical effect, but video
games and slovenly clothing (outside the home) aren’t necessarily
linked. of course, if George Will had seen me alone in my apartment,
unbathed, unkempt, playing WoW for 10 hours and subsisting on turkey
sandwiches and carrot sticks, he might be justified in concluding that
I was unable of functioning or dressing properly in society…
“alone in my apartment,
unbathed, unkempt, playing WoW for 10 hours and subsisting on turkey
sandwiches and carrot sticks”
It’s a good thing your better half came back. Had she been gone for another month we might have lost you completely. Although I will admit that the first 6 months of WoW when that was basically my life, too, were pretty good times. Not as good as my current domestic bliss, but I did have some fun. Anyway…
George Will is a snob, obviously, and so is Roger Ebert for that matter, when he dismisses games and gamers. They can’t really be blamed for it, however. They’re old. I mean this in a completely neutral sense, however. They were adults when video games first became popular, and when they first became did they were marketed almost exclusively to children. It’s difficult to fathom that a genre whose first steps included something simplistic as Pac-Man could evolve into a masterpiece like Portal, Bioshock, or Fallout 3.
Would they “understand” what I find so intellectually stimulating about Portal or SimCity or EVE if I could show it to them for twenty minutes? Not likely. I grew up playing games, and so my mind has become accustomed to being entertained in a more active way. Movies and books and all that are wonderful, transcendent art forms, but they are essentially passive, and being able to pull the levers yourself, even if the outcome is as pre-scripted and essentially unspontaneous as a Michael Bay movie, is more interesting than just waiting for it to happen.
the slovenly state described is from circa 2005, in my apartment in Austin, while procrastinating from grad school. When A-Yo was gone, I was slightly less unkempt.