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The Novel's Lifecycle: Low Art to Mass Art to High Art to Irrelevance
You know, The Novel was not always so respectable, it was native to an emerging urban middle class and their vulgar Mass Literacy. When cultural elites deigned to notice it, they saw a commercial, clickbaity medium; they didn't see the crown jewel of Occidental high culture, only prattle for frivolous women and pulpy adventure stories for boys:
I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind : it is such an utter loss to the reader, that it is not so much to be called pass-time as kill-time.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819)
But eventually the Ambitious Artist saw an arbitrage: "Okay, novels are low status, but for that small price I could worry less about money, reach a mass audience, and achieve immortality for pioneering this greenfield medium, in which I see the germ of destiny."
By 1850 Melville could pursue canonical ambitions in an adventure tale marketed at mass readership. At sea Ishmael is a wordcel landlubber LARPing as an adventurer, while on land he's a nautical hayseed LARPing as a cosmopolitan sophisticate. I take Ishmael as a semi-accidental metaphor for the rising novel itself—on the knife edge of high and low culture, playfully rejecting both.
The novel reached its peak of prestige and sophistication (if arguably not "Greatness") just as film was decisively outcompeting its mass appeal. High modernists like Joyce conceded popular culture to flashier "clickbait," and min-maxed what had become the novel's strengths—a reservoir of formal sophistication and prestige plus an elite audience. Both sides of the production-consumption divide could support daring avant-garde experiments.
Then as the modernist generation expired, young artists strayed to more overpowered mediums, and the novel withdrew into university writing workshops, collapsing into gemlike short stories. Today's fiction writer trades relevance for prestige at such a steep discount you can't help but question his motives. Would it be too precious to argue that David Foster Wallace's suicide was the novel's final judgement upon itself?
Gaming's Lifecycle: Low Art to Mass Art
If anything, video games came of age in an even lowlier place than the novel—in the arcades, platonically commercial with their coin slots and their clickbaity sounds and lights. Arcade machines needed to grab attention, ingest quarters, and pay for themselves, now, which constrained their creators beyond the tolerance of high-cultural ambition. But this Darwinian feedback loop ensured remarkable craftsmanship within the confines of the hyper-commercial design space. Even beyond individual games, the arcade space itself gave life to a dream world no less real than the sunlit world outside, presaging the medium's ridiculous aesthetic power.
The arrival of consoles and PC games was not a pure step forward. Besides diluting the "aura" of the physical arcade, the all-or-nothing revenue model of cartridge sales encouraged marketing at the expense of baseline craftsmanship. But in return, the relaxation of moment-to-moment clickbait dynamics allowed for mechanical depth, nonlinearity, and subtler presentation. Internet connectivity opened other vast frontiers. All in all, the design space for video games expanded so massively that we're only beginning to catch up.
Thesis: I think games now are about where the novel was in the early 1800s—formally mature, ready for great ambitions, but still lacking in great works, somewhat disreputable, and only just growing out of clumsy defensiveness.
If nothing else, it's encouraging that the greatest game ever made is also the most popular. To describe Minecraft's genre (an open world social sandbox) is sufficient to describe its greatness. Notch knew what he had achieved in opening entire new dimensions of player agency. If Minecraft's End Poem crowned any other game, it would ring self-indulgent and embarrassing. Instead, it affirms its own artistic dignity, and that of gaming as a medium—but its successors will take their dignity for granted, or even look back nostalgically on low-cultural ghettoization.
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