The Lullabeep of a Digital Cradle

A little boy – or, increasingly, a little girl – fumbles with a keyboard or joystick with a focused addiction. He or she is entirely absorbed in the events on the screen, the rest of the world does not exist. Everybody plays!

Computer games (from small-screen console games to PC and online games) are the quintessential media forms of today’s visual culture and lifestyle: they will change our approach to our world of experience and culture in a historic way. It is a rare opportunity for us to follow this change at such a close range, although we may not exactly understand what is taking place.

Since the 1960s, electronic games and the experimental demo culture looming in the background have perhaps been the only section in computer culture that has undergone genuine growth. Another is the change in office work – computers dominate all contemporary chains of information production.

A world of experience based on computers has been largely dismissed in our culture, as its vision has been found disquieting and its value measured in terms of an external cultural reality; from the point of view of cultural primacy instead of the volume of cultural production related to e-experiences, the cultural commitment of makers and users or the actual impact of the e-world. Now their economical, and perhaps also their social and pedagogical, value has finally been recognised. Yet content criticism and the subsequent emergence into an art form, receiving cultural acknowledgement, is still awaiting the Final Approval.

Perttu Rastas
Senior Media Curator