Any Austin: disagreement

Transcript context

…Painting gets better from before Giotto through whenever. Well, you know more about painting than me, so I can talk to you about video games and maybe some other stuff. It does seem to be the case that there’s a nascent period for any artistic medium in which we’re figuring out the very basic tools. I don’t know that I’m convinced that once that has resolved itself, art gets qualitatively better. For the most part, I think art is good all the time. There’s always good art for everything always everywhere, but this is different because we process art a little bit differently, maybe? In the sense that I’m just going up and looking at it and bringing myself to it and finding the equilibrium between me and the thing. Maybe a lot of that is just, I can bring my own value to anything. I think that’s the point of art. In that modality, I totally reject the idea — I’ll keep it just on video games because I can actually back this up with information — I totally reject the notion that video games used to be better. I totally reject the notion that they used to be worse. I think by about 19 — whenever Nintendo put out the Entertainment System — ’81, ’82, ’83, whatever. Once Atari crashed, those games do [laughs] stink. There’s a neatness to them. There’s a historical context in which they have some neat value. I did recently play the majority of those Atari games and they, mostly, are very bad. But by the time Nintendo revitalized the industry in the ’80s, games have basically been really good, and they’ve been really fun. They’re way more complicated now than they’ve ever been, and they cost way more money. But the value in your heart that you get from playing Red Dead Redemption II is different in terms of tone or timbre or whatever. In the aggregate, it’s not that much more impactful than playing The Legend of Zelda in 1984 on the NES. Are we creating canonical games at the rate we used to? Many people tell me no.…

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