For me, gaming is not necessarily a distraction from life’s “important stuff”. Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, once wrote an infamous (and lazy) hit piece on the Discworld novels not long after Terry Pratchett’s death. To be fair to Jones, he later held it up as his “most shameful moment as a critic”. Nevertheless, he clearly draws a distinction between “entertainment” and “art”, and believes life is “too short to waste” on ordinary entertainment (particularly the “graveyard for the English language” that is the fantasy genre).
Mssr. Jones thinks we should be spending our precious time reading “art”, by which he means novels of the sort Philip Roth wrote. Michael Moorcock once said of novels of the sort Philip Roth wrote that they are “usually blokes writing about being a bloke, and quite frankly I can’t think of anything more boring… It’s the modern novel’s final fling, the ‘bloke novel’… All the various versions of the right of passage.”
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