The purpose of art, as I see it, is to move another, or even oneself. To evoke emotion. To make us feel something. It doesn't have to be deep or profound necessarily, sometimes it's just the uplifting that comes from a heroic victory in an epic film, or sadness of a character's death, or the giddiness that girls get from romantic comedies.
As technology has evolved, so have our mechanisms for evoking emotions in art. In some ways, this is good, in others, it is bad. Does the increased intensity provided by film now diminish that of paintings? Maybe. Or maybe they're just different types of experience.
I miss being moved. Maybe it's because I'm older now, but I don't find things that move me very easily. This is part of why I write - to move myself, because so few others do. I might be jaded. But I feel a lack of creativity in the world these days, at least in American media. Movies are recycled - the same comic book movie, the same epic war movie, the same romantic comedy, the same goofy guy comedy. What might have moved me once, no longer does, because you can see it in fifteen different incarnations every year. Television is much the same, and even my typical bastion for creative relaxation - video games - often fails me now. Most of these industries are primarily after money and once they figure out what sells, they sell as much of it as possible.
In some ways, video games were my first true creative experience. I remember being sucked into Final Fantasy VI when I was a kid and really, for the first time outside of Tolkien's books, knew what it was to be immersed in something and to have it move me. Video games are great for this because you actually assume the role of a character - you follow them, learn with them, bleed with them. Video games also have the time to truly spin out a tale - games can take as much as 20 hours or more to complete, although at least half of that is the "gaming" part and less actual narrative. As technology has advanced, I see fewer games spinning compelling narratives. I lament back to the days of the role-playing game in the '90s, when the Final Fantasy franchise was in its prime and other, less-known, games were being churned out, like Xenogears or the first couple Suikoden games. I write this in part because I was poking around the Internet today and once again eyeing the one game I am looking forward to this year - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. That series, in particular, is as immersive a single-player experience as I've ever seen and truly a beacon of light among gaming. If the game plays out as beautifully and intensely as the trailer for it shows, then it will hopefully be a landmark gaming experience, the type I crave and so rarely experience anymore.
Writing is, of course, the greatest medium for creative expression. Words are limitless and allow a more ambiguous relationship between author and reader - I can write a description of a character, or a town, but it's not down to the finest details - those are filled in by the reader, giving everyone their own unique variation of the writer's world. For example, in reading the Lord of the Rings, my Aragorn or my Frodo may have looked similar to your imagined version, but most certainly not the same. That's the magic that writing alone captures - the reader's imagination is put to work filling in those finer descriptive holes, holes which, if filled by the author, would of course be indescribably cumbersome to read.
But at the same time, because books are not visual, we're not inundated with book advertisements - not like we are for movies and video games. Books can't have trailers, as it were. It's rare to see a book release get the press that George R. R. Martin's recent release did, and you can bet the farm that it had no small part to do with the running of the HBO series based on his books not long prior to the release. I'll even admit, I started reading them because of the series (although they were on my list regardless; I just bumped them up as a result). And I know if I did, plenty of other people did, too. This is one of the difficulties of being an author that, even in the age of self-publication, I see - how do you get the book out there? How do people find out nowadays? Like so much in life, it seems it just boils down to being a lucky shot in the dark...
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