Ian Bogost - Mel Brooks, Ontologist

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Mel Brooks, Ontologist

from Videogaming Illustrated, October 1982

February 15, 2010

short url: http://bogo.st/23

tags: philosophy , videogames

One of my students found a bunch of old computer and videogame magazines and shared them with me last week. I've been slowly perusing them as time allows, and I found something surprising in the October 1982 issue of Videogaming Illustrated.

It's from a multi-page feature called Star Words, in which different celebrities, mostly actors, offer their impressions of videogames. The main story that month featured Robert Culp (of The Greatest American Hero fame), but the section also offers a half-page inset with shorter reactions. I reproduce it below (click for a larger, more legible version).

The plainly negative reactions from Christopher Reeve and Chevy Chase are intriguing of course, but its the brilliant and prescient one-liner from comedian Mel Brooks that caught my eye:

"Videogames are not for us. They're here to entertain the television."

Chuckle you may, but this is precisely the sort of argument I've been mustering in more philosophical contexts: videogames are not just objects for people, but objects for microprocessors and input devices and televisions too.

So, there you have it, Mel Brooks, object-oriented ontologist.

Comments (7)

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Figures. That man's a wicked genius.

anxiousmodernman on February 16, 2010 8:31 AM

pathetic

asmar on February 16, 2010 2:55 PM

I wonder what I said back then..I bet it was ironic, seeing that I became Dr. Breen in Half-life 2

Robert Culp on February 16, 2010 3:44 PM

I get a bit angry at the shortsighted techno-luddite attitudes of these sort of comments. Read a book? Doesn't he realize that was the technology that killed our ability to recite 1000-line epic poems? And of course these guys didn't get rich and famous by having people come to see them in person, but instead they paid to sit in some dark room watching a flickering light...

Oh well.

Noah Falstein on February 17, 2010 8:04 PM

Chevy Chase's comment is actually the most balanced and well-qualified.

How does one attain the official title of Bon vivant?

Mike Keesey on February 17, 2010 9:27 PM

If we consider videogames' stage of development in that time, maybe it'll be a waste of time play them.

Adriano on February 18, 2010 7:44 AM

Mike Keesey: Not entirely sure, but from the trivia page on the movie High Anxiety, on IMDB, it says:

"When Hitchcock walked out at movie's end without saying a word, Brooks feared that Hitchcock hated the movie. But days later, Hitchcock sent a congratulatory case of wine to Brooks, knowing that Brooks was a wine connoisseur."

So I assume that Brooks has a bit of a reputation.

Rory on March 24, 2010 3:17 PM

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