Comment by logifail

Yes. The one feature I want from Kindle is the ability to buy a digital book and "upgrade" to a print version if I want to own a physical copy.

I much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.

The real tragedy of this is that nobody will know who Mister Rogers is by that time.

Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see.

Unfortunately schools often fail to teach the message behind the works we view as classics.

Shakespeare wrote not just to entertain, but to inform and comment on what was happening at the time. Unfortunately many teachers don't do a good job, or don't have the time, to explain the background of the works. Students often don't know or understand that his works were often directed at specific royalty or other influential people. And so when we first read his works, we don't get the insults, slights, and compliments that would have been obvious to people back then.

Other classics speak about what it is to be human, and evoke imagery that most works never manage. What we consider to be the classics are only a small percentage of novels, poetry, and essays created in their time. There are works being written today that will become classics, but they have to be shown to be meaningful to future generations, just like the current classics have.

There are some games telling wonderful stories, and maybe they'll come to be regarded as classics in their own right. But the Super Marios, Warcrafts, and even Assassin's Creeds are not going to be among them. They're pioneers in their own right, but they don't actually have anything to teach us about the human condition, politics of their day, or have a timelessness that help towards enlightenment.

We should treasure poetry and literature because it's about the experience of reading, just like video games are about the experience of playing. Describing Super Mario Bros (You jump on, over, and around things, sometimes throwing fireballs, until you rescue the princess) doesn't do the experience of playing the game justice. Describing "i carry your heart with me" (I love you so much that all I do is by and for you) doesn't do the poem justice.

And here is the poem:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                    i fear  

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-ee cummings

Because our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released.

The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.

Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded.

Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?

Ignoring the provocative/trolling part, studying digital design from a cultural-historic PoV might turn out to much harder than reading books written centuries ago because of lost sources, formats, and devices. Even HTML, with its deep roots in the digital humanities (SGML), has been brittled to death because $reasons.

If you ever feel inclined, take some courses in any cultural or art history department at a somewhat reputable college or university.

You will see professors are already tying "classics" to current cultural products. Drawimg parallels, discussing patterns and influences.

We jumped from Nietzsche to Japanese manga.

It's not either/ or, it's both.

I was at SFSU and Amsterdam uni. YMMV.