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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

Videogames are rapidly becoming the predominant medium of artistic expression. Especially horror (even Undertale could be categorized as horror or at least with horror elements). I've seen horror games that are far more complex thematically than anything coming out of Hollywood or in literature these days.

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Would it be true to say that technological and educational progress makes art increasingly complex as it is easier to use a specific art medium having means to do so?

I did not think of AI generation starting my comment but here I am with my last sentence.

I think that's generally the case. In Aesthetic Theory (which is fairly inaccessible to the general public, probably best to read this[0] article instead) Adorno suggests that art mediums progressively annihilate each other as technology advances and the condition of possibility for an artwork is also the destruction of all previous works of art, both solidifying them in the history of art and also restructuring it entirely around the artwork itself, which contains all previous art historical ruptures inside it.

[0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

Some of my favorite stories are from videogames, but I don't know if the medium as a whole is outpacing films. AAA games have a lot of the same problems as Hollywood; they're usually very formulaic and safe. And while indie games are more thematically varied, they're hit or miss on execution, a lot like indie films.

That said, horror movies specifically are often very underwhelming in the themes they explore, so horror videogames don't have a high bar to beat.

it’s been this way since vice city

- Broken Sword

- Curses!/Jigsaw

- The Longest Journey

- Trinity

- Outcast

Text/graphical adventures were like 20-30 years ahead of Hollywood, but 20 years behind paper books and fandom.

While I won't necessarily agree with Vice City being the appropriate demarcation, I recently learned that GTA Vice City (2002) is closer in time to its settings (1986) than it is to the present day, and that made me feel things.

And yet, there's few early-2000's nostalgia, even 90's nostalgia or retro hasn't really taken off yet. Closest thing I can think of is Breaking Bad, and that came out in 2008, so at the time it wasn't even "2000's nostalgia".

But the thing with BB is that cheap feature-phones are an important plot device, but 2008 was a turning point in that the iPhone and Android smartphones were taking the world by storm, as did fast always-on internet. I posit that it's not so much the year or time, but the technology and experiences of the time that determine if something is considered retro.

80's was cable TV and walkmans; 90's wasn't much different, but late 90's / early 2000's was marked by the rise of the internet. But people sitting at their computer doesn't make for good TV. Late 2000's to now is the era of smartphones, but again, I don't think anyone will feel nostalgic about people sitting alone together browsing Reddit or HN for hours on end.

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