Steve Ramsay quote from McLuhan on Computer Games
I just came across this paragraph in McLuhan. He’s talking about comic books, but it seems directly applicable to the current situation of computer games:
“The first comic books appears in 1935. Not having anything connected or literary about them, and being as difficult to decipher as the *Book of Kells*, they caught on with the young. The elders
of the tribe, who had never noticed that the ordinary newspaper was as frantic as a surrealist art exhibition, could hardly be expected
to notice that the comic books were as exotic as eighth-century illumnations. So, having noticed nothing about the *form*, they
could discern nothing of the *contents*, either. The mayhem and violence were all they noted. Therefore, with naive literary logic,
they waited for violence to flood the world. Or, alternatively, they attributed existing crime to the comics. The dimmest-witted convict learned to moan, “It wuz comic books done this to me.”
Steve