I like Alien3, myself.

I see how it's not everything it could be -- it feels rather more like an episode of "Alien: The ABC TV Series" than a film on its own merits, and it kind of makes the triumphant ending of Aliens...well, it fucks it. But it's not the worst piece of shit I've ever seen call itself a movie, nor even the worst sequel.

Dunno about brilliant though.

Anyway. Getting back to video games.

One thing that people are doing in defense of video games (I was guilty of it just above in dismissing Sim City) is implying that yes yes, we can all agree that OLDER video games weren't art. We're talking about the NEWER ones.

I used Pac-Man as an example of a non-art video game and my dad took issue with me over that. And frankly, I think he was right to.

Imagine Pac-Man had never existed. That video games never existed. And in the 1980s, someone built a Pac-Man machine -- built an arcade cabinet and had the screen in it and the maze and the little yellow wedge gobbling up pellets.

But you couldn't control it. There was no joystick and no buttons. You just watched.

Put this in a modern art museum (again, circa 1980) and tell me it doesn't belong there. How is this functionally different than a painting in a frame? It's a digital, animated equivalent. And if made at a time when it was state-of-the-art, it would be pretty impressive.

Then imagine that a year or two on, the artist adds a control interface and allows anyone to come up and take control of the yellow wedge. Suddenly, because there's participation, this is not art?

I would contend that this is another level of art, another way for the viewer to engage, just as if an artist put a brush and paints beside his work at a museum and invited anyone who care to, to add to it.

An art museum stretches a canvas across an entire wall and invites anyone to come up and add something. This can't be art?

Well hot damn, that article even uses Modern Warfare as a specific example.

Why are we being mean to Brian? He's being an unmitigated ubernerd, but come now. We invoked Ents earlier and expected rightly that everyone gets the reference. This is a safe place.