Article on Gaming
Here is an interesting article on gaming:
Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-'em-ups
Many observers agree that the online game community represents the most important social and cultural components of electronic software's future. "Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices," says ESA's Lowenstein. "I doubt any other form of entertainment holds out that promise," he says. "We have only scratched the surface of what [interactive entertainment] can be."
posted by Matt Byrnes @ 7:58 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Sure, there are plenty of games like Lineage that allow for people of many races and nationalities to come in contact with each other, which helps break down social and political barriers, but games are also increasingly being put to divisive political, social, and religious uses. It won't take long before, like the other media forms (print, news, video), they start splintering into either common-denominator-sanitized offerings that say nothing of import or niche products targeted at the insular sensibilities of increasingly homogenous audiences that are hostile to other viewpoints.
Consider the games that we are already starting to see with production values that approach the AAA (or at least AA) titles:
* Games that depict all middle eastern people as terrorists, and encourages you to kill them.
* Games that allow Palestinian avatars to kill Israelis.
* Games that let white supremacists kill minorities or run concentration camp simulations.
* Games that engage in historical revisionism for evangelical Christians.
* Games that shill for different political parties.
As the science of using this medium to engage in divisiveness matures, gaming will increasingly suffer the same problems as the political flavorings of the news media.
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