Mimesis and Video Games

Perfect timing for our interrogations of Plato and Aristotle: a discussion, from Swarthmore College historian and tech/fantasy geek Tim Burke, of video game inputs and correlations to the real world.  Here's the key conceptual paragraph:

What bugs me about the middlebrow celebration of the downfall of the multibutton controller and its kindred devices (keyboards, etc.) is the naive understanding of mimesis buried inside that enthusiasm. The driving faith here is that representation and lived experience should have a 1:1 correspondence in order to rid ourselves of the work and difficulty that comes from a slippage between the two. There’s at least a kissing-cousin resemblance between this view and older positivist ideas, lingering on in some scientific and social-scientific circles, that we should tinker ceaselessly with language until all ambiguity is banished from it and it thus can be used for the efficient description of the real world.

The last paragraph is also crucial, so read the whole thing and then come back here to talk about it.

There will be no more naive understandings of mimesis in this class!!