Author: Dotan Dimet

Greg Costikyan, game designer and SF writer (and probably one of the most insightful writers to write about game design) has a blog (found on boingboing). Also with RSS feed.

High art is dead art. It’s art that gets show in museums, played in symphony halls, buried in dusty tomes. It’s worth preserving for the sake of the continuity of our culture, and because a self-selected elite loves it. But it’s museum art, it’s museum music, it’s museum prose. All those silly wine-swilling artists in Soho; all those academic musicians composing “new” symphonies; all those university professors writing novels, stuck in academia because they can’t make enough money to survive from their actual writing–they have a role to play in our culture, of course, but what they’re doing isn’t really very interesting.

Is it?

Low art is what’s fundamentally important. Low art reflects what’s actually going on in our culture today. Low art expands the boundaries of the possible. Low art is vital, exciting, vibrant, disturbing, cool–and, generally, fun. Popular music, genre fiction, comics, independent film, weird shit on the Internet–and games.

That’s where it’s at, man.

Grand Theft Auto isn’t art? Then I guess neither is Fatboy Slim, Sandman, or King Rat.

A TV show I just caught the tail of mentioned an archeological pioneer called Petrie. Google elaborates that this is probaby William Matthew Flinders Petrie, an important Victorian Egyptologist (that page is part of the Petrie Museum site).

Another link that showed up is for a gothic RPG campaign run by the RPGA, RPGA Living Death – Jasper-Petrie Expedition.