I owe you this one EDIT: No, I really don't.

Even before the next part, think about this:

"So the audience was probably more impressed by seeing someone judged to do something well, rather than judging for themselves. So I think Guitar Hero is less about the music, which is valued subjectively, and more about doing a preset task skillfully when objectively judged."
(from the second link. Don't read it, for God's sake.)



First, this is incredibly interesting reading regarding MW2's "No Russian":


There is, however, another point about "No Russian" that appears more strongly from a classical perspective than perhaps any other. It seems to me an undeniable fact that Infinity Ward, who put analogously atrocious action in MW2's predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is maintaining a commitment to bringing the players of its games face-to-face with the ethical ambiguity of war. That fact by itself shows a development of game culture that mirrors the development that we can see in the homeric tradition when we look at that tradition diachronically, and pick apart its strata: in the Iliad, for example, the ethical simplicity of tales of glory becomes, over time, the ambiguous story of an Achilles who drags Hector around Troy, in front of his grieving parents, and then kills Trojan youths on Patroclus' funeral pyre. Indeed, this development leads in ancient Athens to tragedy, the ne plus ultra of literary ethical thought, where atrocities are used over and over to expose the fragility of our ethical claims and to strengthen our understanding of why we must make those claims nonetheless.

http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2009/11/brief-classical-thoughts-on-no-russian.html

Second, here is a pretty good editorial piece from Kotaku. Tim Rogers occasionally writes these ridiculously long (and thus convoluted) pieces for Kotaku. Although a lot of his stuff is frankly pretty egoistic, if you dig you can find some real treasure. Here is an excerpt from his latest:

Rhythm games are not primarily about music: They are about doing something right and being told you're doing it right. I can totally, absolutely get behind that sort of thing. I use the word "crunch" a lot, in my "line of work," to describe the feeling in a game where you know you're doing something right, doing something wrong, or just plain doing something. God Hand has tons of crunch. Most games these days don't have any. Guitar Hero and Rock Band are games made up of about 99% crunch. You know exactly what you're doing in a Guitar Hero game: You're pressing a button at the right time, and the game tells you that you're awesome because of it. I guess there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's like Brain Training: You answer these simple math problems every day, the game assesses your speed, tells you if you're getting better or not, and before you know it, real world applications bubble to the surface: You find you're getting better at typing, your night vision has increased, you've stopped forgetting your car keys, who knows. The simple "Yes!" feedback of these games provides us with the experience Getting Better At Something; it can't be long before we become Better People because of them, and it can't be too far after that that we find ourselves literally and figuratively happy.

So, Christmas Day, there I was in my parents' house, and my little brother was playing DJ Hero on a large CRT television. He had the DJ controller on the floor, and was hunched over it, scratching at the turntable and clicking on the buttons, the TV volume depressingly low. I thought about Konami's Pop'n'Music, the most abstract rhythm game out there, in that it just uses buttons, which are meant to be pressed in time to lights that are furiously streaming down the screen. The Pop'n'Music machine in the arcade closest to my first apartment in Tokyo (where I went to play Virtua Fighter IV or Street Fighter III) had broken speakers, so the volume was so terribly low that you could barely hear it even if you were playing. The way those machines are set up, you can't really hear the music unless you're standing close enough to play, anyway. So for a skeeze standing ten feet back watching a couple of bouncy schoolgirls having fun, the on-screen action looks ridiculous; the clacking of the big, hollow, candy-like, palm-smashed buttons hardly makes sense in the context of the flashing on the screen. For years I was scared to touch Pop'n'Music, because it looked so complicated. I later realized that Pop'n'Music was Konami's way of bringing Dance Dance Revolution to the people who didn't want to get too much exercise. I like to think that I'm pretty immune to the "Damn Kids" syndrome; I think that I'll grow up as an embracer of new technology, for example. Back then, though, Pop'n'Music really got at me. It was weird enough to see two kids playing it, clapping each other on the shoulder with every smashing success, though watching some older guy play it alone with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth was really depressing. What's the use of a rhythm game if you can't even pretend to be holding a guitar? What's the use of a rhythm game where you're not even dancing? At the end of the day, it's not a rhythm game: It's a pleasure-enforcing device. I realized, back with Pop'n'Music, that I was being much like your parents when they call your music "noise": All your parents can hear, when you listen to music up in your room, is the sound of the lowest part of the bass guitar traveling through the floor. Maybe, if they could hear the rest, they'd be willing to acknowledge its artistry.

In case you skipped the bastard-like personal anecdote that preceded the part where I started talking about video games, let me summarize for you: I commented naively and at length on the socio-political-economic ramifications of the diorama of humanity present inside a super-trendy club, confronting head-on the question "do people really only like what they're told to like?" and coming away with the conclusion "well, kinda." I was selected to play a rock and roll show at this super-trendy club party event on the basis of my being an agreeable person, the same way I am selected by editors-in-chief to write magazine or web columns. I don't hate music: I just love music in a tough way. I scrape and scream. I enjoy looseness and stupidity. Yet, somehow, at the end of my set, a woman who was obviously a Swedish fashion model literally asked me, in so many words, to make out with her. I faced a scary question: Was this woman attracted to me, my "music", or the fact that someone in charge of this event had been so bold and confident in his taste as to choose me as one of only two live musical acts to perform during the entire eight-hour event? There exists maybe a one in a hundred chance that this woman was immensely, real-ly, sexually attracted to the idea of a man doing whatever he wanted and not caring what other people thought. Maybe she thought I was an artist. My final conclusion is that people in clubs don't just like what they're told to like, they like what other people like them like, and they pay a high cover charge to get inside this place where they're sure they'll find other people like them, who like them because they're like them. It's all very sketchy. In the real world, more often than not, we do not find ourselves with a situation wherein we press a button and immediately receive feedback of the black-or-white yes-or-no variety. Do people like me? isn't as efficient a question as How do I feel? Do I feel happy? What does all this have to do with video games? Absolutely everything.

....
Maybe the world economies would crumble if our entertainments stopped encouraging growth, improvement, or skill. Maybe we'd all turn into hippies if the chairman of Coca-Cola got up in front of a press conference and said, "You know, guys, we're closing up shop. Just start drinking water." Would that be so bad? I've used this excellent straw-man argument before: If everyone in the world were an all-day-meditating, own-crops-growing zen buddhist monk praying for peace, there would be no war. I've dipped tentatively into a lot of philosophy, and I've always considered sentiments like that to be something of a tiny baby elephant in the room. Why can't we be happy all the time? Why can't everything be love and peace? Why must we have shadow to lend context to light? Why must we have failure to lend context to success? Why can't everyone just give up all at once? I don't know.


http://kotaku.com/5468512/can-videogames-make-us-happy?skyline=true&s=i
(excerpt starts after the pic of Brutal Legend)