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Why is the cultural prestige/influence of music 10x that of video games? (twitter.com/robinhanson)
3 points by georgestrakhov on Aug 24, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



I remember my old games fondly. There was just a post this week about Tempest using long-term exposures, and found it fascinating.

The thing about music though... it is people communicating with people---stories. Sometimes it able to pull our "heart strings." Ain't no program gonna do that, or at least very few of them. They don't even try for the most part.

A video game is pretty neat of course, but it's typically like an electronic version of the game of Life or Monopoly, maybe a shoot-em-up. Fun for an evening but not moving anyone to tears. To some extent that's a choice of the content producers.


McDonalds sells billions of hamburgers, but you don't see any Michelin stars on it.


One thing I think is funny is that my mother-in-law goes to the casino and plays the video slots, something I'd never do, and I play XBOX/Steam/Nintendo DS, something that she'd never do.


Statistics like this never mention that the "gaming" market is mostly Android/iOS.

Those are mostly digital casinos, as far as I can tell, hence the citation frequency kind of irks me.


That's easy: rock stars strutting around on stage have infinitely more charisma than nerds slaving in an artificially-lit cubicle farm.


This just in -- cultural influence does not depend on the amount of revenue generated.




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