Mourning the Loss of a Familiar Opinion

At least one thing is clear to me after reading “Geek Fun Isn’t Frivolous” (Opinion, May 15), and that is that the editors of The Times have given up on dealing with reality in the Opinion section and are rabidly pushing the gobbledy-geek mentality onto a once thought-provoking and exciting menu concerning problems and philosophical differences in our extremely complex world involved with genocide, suicide bombers, starvation, gang warfare, ethnic wars and degradation of the planet’s water, air and land.

But these are no longer interesting because they are of the “real” world, and the new emphasis is on entertainment games of the virtual world, which includes poor-quality comics placed in a serious section of the newspaper. At least have the decency to put these comics in the entertainment section.

I feel one of my longtime friends has died.

The least the L.A. Times can do is have the decency to let the reading public know who is responsible for this demise and the philosophy behind filling Opinion pages with comics that disrespect the mentality of your readers.

Ula Pendleton

Los Angeles

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The original premise that Raph Koster makes in his article is right on, as are his arguments to support it. Video games are indeed going to be a most important form of art and entertainment in time, once it gets past the phase of being relatively new and unfamiliar.

The thing that Koster misses on, though, is how. It’s implied that, in order for something to be considered “art,” it must deal with complex issues like “global warming and curing cancer,” or be relevant to the world. The thing is, video games are already at that point, depending on what kind of game one is talking about.

Although such games as “Grand Theft Auto” might not have much complexity to show for itself, the role-playing game genre, for instance, has believable characters, beautiful artwork, complex musical scores and (in the cases of some) plot lines that touch on politics and societal issues (i.e., “Final Fantasy X’s” portrayal of the dangers of religious fundamentalism), while still staying detached enough from reality to seem wondrous and a means of temporary escape from the daily stress of real life for us “geeks.”

Shain Neumeier

Pasadena