The March publication of the Byron Review, the government’s first official investigation into the effects of electronic media on children, offered an opportunity to examine what is potentially being gained and lost in the increasing ubiquity of electronic, interactive entertainments. Instead – dazzled by the quite astonishing sales figures and controversial content of recent games releases like the notorious Grand Theft Auto IV - most mainstream accounts of video games since have tended to be either a dazzling stream of featurettes hailing their ascendancy, or bitter dismantlings of any and all of their claims as culture.Â
In this month’s cover story, I look at some of the complexities of the culture of modern video games, and the astonishing divide it has carved out between those generations born either side of the computer era. I remember reading newspaper articles about video games while I was just starting at secondary school, fifteen years ago. It was, usually, bewildering. Here were writers publishing serious pieces in the national press who simply didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. They had clearly never played any of the games they were writing about. And their concerns were bizarrely unconnected to everything I thought I knew about the sociable, intensely absorbing activity of playing games on computers and consoles. How, my friends and I wondered, could anyone take such absurd objections seriously?
Fifteen years later, I’m still playing video games and I’m still bemused by the way they’re discussed. But I no longer think that the objections many people raise against them are absurd: under even the most hysterical rhetorics are, usually, reasonable concerns about social change and continuity, the loss of certain kinds of experience and learning, and the moral and aesthetic limitations of “on-screen” culture. What amazes me, rather, is the lack of a serious, mutually well-informed debate about a phenomenon that is likely to be a dominant cultural force in the 21st century: an industry that’s already bigger business than cinema or physical music sales, and that is likely soon enough to overtake videos, DVDs and even books.
There’s never been a more important time to attempt to comprehend the future before it simply becomes an ill-understood, exploitative present. I hope you’ll join in the discussion on this blog.
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Firstly I have a friend who has carried out extended ethnography with gaming communities, and yes it is clearly a much more complex and creative space than the doomsayers would have it.
http://www.media-anthropology.net/knorr_online_nomads.pdf
Is a link to a conference paper of his.
It seems from your article that video games are displacing TV, so a comparison between the mediums is worth thinking about. Clearly video games are more interactive than TV, but less connected to everyday life.
But the latter is likely to change. Reuters, I believe, have a presence in second life, and sooner or later people will start integrating game worlds with the internet and Second Life via variosu forms of Mashup.
Then we have the prospect, perhaps, of news bulletins you can interact with, or guilds doing investigative journalism together.
What is also interesting is the political economy of games: Perhaps the above options will never emerge in the real world, but it would be interesting to hear of the power politics of a to why this is so. In this sense video games are much less divorced from other forms of media.
The discussion of writing and narrative for non-linear environments was brief but fascinating, surely as an English Grad you’d be in a good position to give that a really good treatment Tom.
Thanks for the link, Daniel, and glad you enjoyed the piece.
Quite right, and intriguing, that games are replacing television – and that radio and the written word are looking far more robust as integrated media. Television, I think, is increasingly damaged by the exclusive attention it demands: you can’t run it in the background on-screen as you can stream a radio broadcast, and you can’t just dip into and out of it at your own pace as you can a page of text. But it’s declining from a huge peak, and I hope that the decline of its advertising breeds innovation as well as desperation.
As for the economics and narrative forms within games: these are huge, fascinating topics, and I’m certainly handling them at length in the book on which the article is (loosely) based…
I think one of the problem is that “gaming” is all being tarred with the same brush, so to speak. There is a you say a huge difference between say Grand Theft Auto, which is fundamentally an individual game which rewards anti-social behaviour, and MMORPGs such as Warcraft which is based on totally different premises, cooperation being one of them.
There are a couple of interesting article by John Seely Brown you must have come across while researching this subject, that also defended the idea of virtual worlds as teaching spaces and as preparation for the real world.
http://conversationstarter.hbsp.com/2008/02/the_gamer_disposition.html
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/needvirtualworlds.pdf
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/playimagination.pdf
However there are studies showing that some of the most popular video games are disengaging boys from real-world pursuits and that this (along probably with parental disengagement!) is a problem. Not having the book with me I can’t quote them but they are in the somewhat controversial “Boys Adrift” book by Dr L Sax…From personal anecdotal experience, my 20-something, partly-Oxford educated brother has explained to us that he no longer plays games because otherwise he becomes obsessed and does nothing else…
Last, I am always curious as to the kind of people who actually have the spare time (or make it, steal it?) – as a mother to 3 children under 6 and a part-time MSc student (in Human-Computer Interaction) I find that even posting this comment is forcing me into an arbitrage (such as, it is now too late to start watching a DVD) so that even contemplating playing such a game is preposterous…
The reason I called one part of Johnson’s book “philistine”, by the way, was because it sought to reduce the worth of all art to its “information” content, not because it elsewhere takes videogames seriously, or rather only semi-seriously.
Steven – sorry if you feel mis-represented by selective quotation – I’m not seeking to imply that you delivered a crude broadside against Johnson, but that his arguments have been divisive, and for interesting reasons – I’d urge readers to read your review in full for those details I lacked space to provide.
On your behalf, I’d also urge readers towards Trigger Happy for its discussion of video game aesthetics – free to read at http://stevenpoole.net/blog/trigger-happier/ – a text I’m sorry I lacked the room to quote at length…
No problem, and thanks for the blurb.
My review of Johnson is here if anyone else is interested:
http://stevenpoole.net/articles/useful-crap/
Looking forward to your book.
You end with: “But the doomsayers are right in one important respect. If we do not learn to balance the new worlds we are building with our living culture, we may lose something of ourselves.”
I wondering . . . the ways you describe WoW and Eve, for instance, and the interviews with players suggest that these are social media, where people work together and build communities and lost-lasting friendships (and even find romantic partners). Couldn’t we, then, describe the activities occurring in and around games as the construction of living cultures? If so, what exactly is being lost?
Lost – I mean something fairly simple, I think. Our culture currently has a rich literary, musical and artistic heritage that is happily “living,” in that it possesses a vigorous community of artists and audiences who continue to contribute to and appreciate living canons. As I note in my piece, for all their complexities and satisfactions, there is much that video games by their very nature cannot give or do, and we would be much the poorer if we fail to realise this, or fail to invest time and resources in sustaining over the next centuries those vital and unique qualities our other cultural media possess. Games are also a living culture, of course; the dichotomy is perhaps more precisely between a nascent culture and our living cultural heritage, but that didn’t sound so snappy…
I love games and spend many happy hours playing them, but my life would be deeply impoverished without music and literature, and I think it’s just as crucial robustly to preach their benefits to technophiles as it is to tell Luddites that interactive media are not all crude or stultifying. The choice should not be allowed to be either/or.
[...] blogs at Prospect, offshoots of their articles, have obviously been filtered and monitored, because the comments that [...]
Any game which donot hammer on our head,donot give challange to our body,donot spark our spirit, is in my opinion curse to us. Electronic game are boring, sleepy,making us dull.
Western culture making everything easy and creating by that pseudohappiness in my opinion is very dangerious. They are killing man`s spontaneous adventure faculty. Making him dole, a machine.All this arise from fear mentality of western culture.
If we make life very easy and pseudo happy we are killing mankind.Life is very boring in this curcimstance. more people came under drepression more may be suicide.
Tom Chatfield wrote:
“Yet most of the charges levelled against games—that
they stunt minds and spark addiction—are based on an
outdated understanding of what gamers do when they sit
down to play”
There is one other major criticism of video games
that you fail to mention. That is that science has
shown that violent video games (and a majority of
video games sold are violent) lead to increased
aggression among players.
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/featworks/?searchterm=video%20games
If you really believe that playing violent video
games does not increase aggression, then why not
make that argument, instead of pretending that
it’s not an issue?
Terry,
I would have liked to address this area more fully, and will be doing so in my book. The essay is mainly about the “culture” of video games, and the research I cite is restricted to a few (reputable) recent studies on addiction and the game/world distinction. It’s certainly well-evidenced that there is a correlation between short-term agitation in audiences and violence in media, including video games; and that violent people seek out and enjoy violent media. We should take note of, and be concerned by, such reports. Yet these are part of an old, old debate that has, I think, more than a whiff of scape-goating about it. Violence within our society is ultimately not an issue we can meaningfully tackle by pretending that anything in the media “made” people do it.
This isn’t to say that an old issue is a non-issue. Whatever we believe about causality, I agree that the simple assertion that games don’t increase aggression (which I don’t make) is not an adequate one. But the debate is riven with competing reports. For instance (Wikipedia has this in its useful article on video game controversies), “Most studies… reach the conclusion that violence in video games is not causally linked with aggressive tendencies. This was the conclusion of a 1999 study by the U.S. government, prompting Surgeon General David Satcher to say, “We clearly associate media violence to aggressive behavior. But the impact was very small compared to other things. Some may not be happy with that, but that’s where the science is.”
As I do say in my piece, it’s appropriate for games to be restricted on the basis of their content, for them to be played in moderation, and for parents (and society at large) to learn about gaming culture and its negatives. As the Byron Review’s executive summary puts it: “having considered the evidence I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media ‘causing’ harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer.”
I’ve been a gamer for a long time. Probably learned more about history from games than I ever did in school. Also learned quite a bit about computers from what I had to do just to make them work. As with many things in life, there are good points and bad points. If you choose to dwell on the bad (addiction, aggressiveness) you will have a bad view of them. But they can teach and the lessons learned will likely stick because of the interactive way you have to learn in games.
It’s a very well written article. The one thing a lot of critics don’t get is the amazing variety of games available. I’ve played several MMORPG’s and they were all a bit different. What never ceases to amaze me is the creativity of players. Developers will expect players to do one thing, but they almost always exceed their expectations.
The other thing people don’t take into account is the interaction. If you’re watching TV, even if it’s something highbrow like Hamlet, you are still just passively watching. When playing a game, you are actively involved in it. Yes, there are a lot of twitch skills to learn. But negotiation, economics and time management are important too.
No wonder this government is going down the pan, the civil servants are playing WoW all day!
No but seriously as an avid computer games player I found this article very interesting. I think the release of GTAIV can be compared to other great cultural moments such as Radiohead releasing ‘In Rainbows’ last year or going back even further The Beatles releasing ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ back in 1967. Its comparable to the anticipation surrounding the releases of the Harry Potter books (like you mentioned) or the Lord of the Rings films.
One of the things that you didn’t mention about computer games was the player versus player (PvP) content. I guess this comes under the term “e-sports” and tends to separate your casual games player from the hardcore. There is no doubt that to compete at this level you require a very thorough, detailed knowledge about the game in question and must possess a wide range of skills to beat your opponent. For example, in WoW PvP you need to know the characteristics and abilities of 9 classes and be able to match your strengths against the weaknesses of your enemy. In this way to me WoW PvP is similar to a tennis match where the best player is the one who knows the most about his opponent and can exploit their weaknesses, whether that’s hitting the ball to a poor backhand or playing defensively against someone who tends to be very wild with their shots. Therefore, computer games do require knowledge, skill and tactical awareness which immediately makes it a much more educational medium than television where all you’re doing is staring at a screen!
However, I would like to draw your attention to the following article: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml. The writer (who is a games player himself) presents quite a negative portrayal of WoW and the things it teaches. As a WoW player I don’t agree with everything that he says but it is interesting nonetheless.
Also I don’t know if you’re aware of a site called http://www.gameriot.com. This site is mainly dedicated to WoW although it does talk about other games also. Its amazing how a game like this produces such a large community. Most of what is written on here is absolute rubbish but I would like to draw your attention to the following article: http://www.gameriot.com/blogs/Europe-America/WoW-as-an-agent-of-European-union/
I think this is an example of how games can be an educational tool and can transcend the virtual world that they create.
By the way when is your book coming out or is it still in development?
Thanks.
Tom Chatfield wrote:
“I would have liked to address this area more fully,
and will be doing so in my book.”
Good, I hope you will do so in a science-based way.
So many violent video game defenders argue that anyone
who is in anyway critical HATES freedom.
“Violence within our society is ultimately not an issue
we can meaningfully tackle by pretending that anything
in the media “made†people do it.”
The scientists aren’t arguing that violent media “makes”
people do anything, just that watching and/or playing
violent media increases aggression.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051202094251.htm
Alchohol doesn’t “make” anyone become violent or commit crimes,
yet people are more likely to commit crimes and become
violent while drunk. Why? because alchohol reduces inhibitions.
Violent media also reduces inhibitions against aggression,
plus in the case of violent video games, players actually
get to practice violence and be rewarded for it.
“…Surgeon General David Satcher to say, “We clearly associate
media violence to aggressive behavior. But the impact was very
small compared to other things. Some may not be happy with that,
but that’s where the science is.—
Sure there are a number of things that have a far greater effect
than violent media, but of course that doesn’t mean that violent
media has NO effect.
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/tvViolence.shtml
The media industry does it’s best to obsfucate the issue, but
parents should be informed that violent media does have a real
effect. And especially if their kid is overly aggressive or
is bullying then parents should be aware that reducing
their child’s exposure to violent media will help.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2001/january17/kidstv-117.html
I sincerely hope you will take these studies (and the hundreds of
similar studies) into consideration while working on your chapter
on violence.
(the wife’s site actually)
51 year old, married 23 years, 17 year old son (Adam(!)) computer game addicted. (admittedly so) He attends an elite HS in NYC; passing but not admirably due to lack of studying; time management issues.
Do not play games w/ my son; naturally, he will not play hockey, squash, tennis or football w/ me. Adam is an absolutely stunning human being…helps his anorexic, ‘cutter’ girl friends and good mate w/ his male friends. Passable family life but for the tension between his gaming and our demand he study. There you have some of it.
Question: the unknowable future you deftly suggest gaming skills may
provide some benefit reminds this dinosaur the analogy of basketball youths dreams of turning pro (on the order of 1 in 10,000 or some such) Unless my son starts his own game company I see no future in it. I do see the boys whose better parents than we, restricting their ‘game time’ doing better in school and being recruited by the colleges. Not to mention, contrary to your M/F ratio of gamers, my sons social skills w/ the ladies ends w/ a brief discussion of the weather. The young ladies (in my sons case) hv no interest in GTA at all. (question coming)
A parents calculation runs something like this:
20Hrs GTA per week over 82% test scores multiply by 16 cell phone calls to discuss game stragegy divide by 6 hrs sleep = exhausted, moody, pasty looking child w/ dim prospects. (there is a question coming)
If son would reduce GTA by 50% multiply by 1 hr additional course study divide by six courses times additional hour of sleep per night = 92% GPA; healthier child, college recruiters and brighter future.
Question (i told you) Do you agree?
Thanks
The Macomb’s
New York, NY
Tom, wonderful piece. Very even-handed and well thought-out (but maybe I just think that because I agree with you).
Harpua beat me to making a solid point that, I think, often gets overlooked in this discussion — namely, the interactivity of games versus other forms of media. It’s quite a fundamental aspect of a goodly portion of the gamer mindset and/or culture; it’s the difference between friends talking excitedly about what happened in yesterday’s football game, versus friends talking excitedly about what they (and 20+ other people) accomplished together yesterday. There’s a world of difference, there, if you stop to think about it. There has always been a greater sense of enjoyment for me in doing something with my friends than watching other people engage in some activity and discussing the outcome with my friends.
Of course, one could always get a few friends and play football out in the park — which, I suppose I’d have to agree, trumps both options I posited above — and the only advantages gaming enjoys over this scenario are the ability to engage in activities you and your mates aren’t able to in your daily lives, and possibly a reduced cost or effort to get together. I can’t very well get my friends together and shoot each other to death (nor would I want to shoot them or anyone else; I’m a nonviolent person by nature), and the cost in time and money to assemble a paintball team is significantly larger than just getting an Xbox and Halo 3 and playing each other online.
Well, I’ve rambled on long enough, I should think. Hope I’ve given you some food for thought for the book, which I look forward to reading.
Cheers!
@Edward
That’s a hard question, we really don’t know your son that well. There is a general truism for addiction is that it fulfills an emotional need: It does something for him, it is an escape, an avenue for expressing his aggression, whatever, it doe something for him.
So if you can get him to articulate what it is he gets out of gaming, why he really enjoys it, which means engaging with him and letting go of the assumption that it is bad for him (per se, outside of the wider context of his life) then you might have some sort of chance of dicussing things that you have experienced that have given you a similar sort of outlet.
Outside of that, of engaging with him on a fairly equal level, you can’t do much: He’s 17 and well aware that it’s his life, even if unaware of the implications. Just to offer some comfort, there is evidence that brains keep developing throughout life, and the faculty to project clearly into the future takes shape for people in their mid twenties or early thirties if at all. So if your son is showing a casual disregard for his future, there is probably not that much you can do about it, far better to address his now.
The prospect blog’s first agony column? There perhaps be a regular feature about modernity and its discontents?
Tom,
Your article was refreshing. However, may I suggest that in the din over violence and isolation, you missed a strand in the controversy? Games are effective teachers because the player must learn the rules and approved strategies in order to progress. Failure to learn is penalised. They are, it would seem, a very effective medium for learning. It seems plausible, therefore, to suggest that they are good at teaching values and assumptions about common sense. There are political games – a few trying to teach conflict resolution, others teaching business values – but nothing challenging. Now, this is more than a games-oriented re-hash of old liberal fears about mass society and it is different precisely because games may be the emerging dominant medium and may be extraordinarily efficient teachers.
Colum
“it fulfills an emotional need: It does something for him, it is an escape, an avenue for expressing his aggression, whatever, it does something for him”
DT tku for ur thoughtful comments. True…he has told me the same. May I add the wife and I hv noticed after an extended session of “expressing his aggression” (say 6 hours straight, i.e. 10-4AM when we’re asleep) a slight ‘twitch’in his mannerism as well a noticeable change in demeanor…think belligerance. Over an extended period of these sessions we think it becomes more noticeable. Sent away to Summer camp in the woods of NH, he returns almost serene. (i’m sure u think us bonkers by now)
No doubt, ‘modernity and its discontents’ plays a role as
certainly do we. Who wrote “The world is too much with us; late and soon, gaming and gaming we lay waste our powers”?
TV’s the big loser to gaming and in my book that’s got to be a good thing. Rather than behaving as passive funnels down which the TV fodder is poured at least some of our kids are sitting forward on the couch and making decisions, competing, judging, strategising, collaborating…
Pointing out the extremes (i.e addictive behaviour) diverts attention from the mainstream of people who do a not unreasonable amount of gaming for fun, without going crazy over it or harming anyone else. In any case, even if our kids spent six hours a day gaming, they would only be matching the hours spent their parents spent semiconscious in front of TV, when they themselves were kids.
Disclosure: I have a 10yr old son who would love to play more games if I’d let him. And we have no TV.
William, I quite agree. We didn’t have a TV at home until I was around 11, and I still barely watch it; active engagements are what satisfy me, and what I want for my children.
I would say, though, that I’m increasingly aware that the kind of immersion games offer has the potential to be more consuming than almost any other activity I can think of. You simply don’t get such things as 24-hour-reading sessions. I remember a time of my life, unhappy for a number of reasons, when I found myself gaming until the extremely antisocial hours of the morning because it distracted me in a complete way that even books — my first and greatest love among all media — could not. Better games than drugs or booze, perhaps, and certainly cheaper; but it made me aware, and a little cautious, of the sheer power of immersion available.
The game, for those of you interested in a putting a date to these things, was Diablo II; and I got my Barbarian up to level 97. A terrifying feat in those early online days…
Thanks Tom. As you mention above, your article was about the culture of gaming so I’m going a bit off-topic now, but as parents of a pre-teen we’re on the lookout now for advice and strategies to avoid the worst excesses of gaming behaviour – the sort you allude to. Of course I’m not at all commenting on your personal history, but this aspect highlights the note made by others in this forum, that parents have a responsibility in the new era of gaming that in actual fact was always present; targeting gaming as the problem is missing the point.
This has been a really interesting discussion. For my part, I’ve been an avid computer gamer since I bought my first PC in 1987. My son (17 y.o.) and I (46 y.o.) both have max-level characters in World of Warcraft, and we are part of an excellent and fairly large guild that has conquered almost all the content in the game thus far.
Gaming has been a way for me and my son to connect and have a shared interest. We often discuss raid strategy, gearing, guild issues, etc. around the dinner table or while we’re driving in the car (fortunately the wife and 13-y.o. daughter are very tolerant of this…they are gamers too, but Pogo.com is more their speed). It is a very social world, this guild we’re in…we know many of our fellow guildies on a first-name basis, and we share events in our lives both in-game and on the guild website. True, we both have to be careful about the amount of time we spend on this activity, but his standardized test scores speak for themselves so somehow he managed to do well in school while still helping his old man and their guild fight their way through Karazhan! We’ve been raiding together during some of the most exasperating — and gratifying — boss kills in the game. It’s a great feeling to turn around and high-five each other after bringing down Netherspite for the first time! Both kids are also active online in emailing and chatting with friends.
There are a couple of reasons why I think it’s worked out pretty well for us. First, the fact that we are all very engaged with the “computer culture” has prevented the gaming, chatting, etc. from becoming something that “only the kids do.” It’s enabled us to keep closer tabs on their online activity and spend more time with them.
Second, we carefully controlled both the kids’ exposure to game violence or objectionable content. I think my son was about ten years old before I ever let him near any game that even hinted at any blood or gore. He just turned 18 and is making his own choices about what games he plays, but we still draw the line at GTA IV…I just don’t like the idea of a game that rewards criminal behavior. We’ve told him that when he’s out of our house and living on his own, he’s free to play whatever he wants, but we’ve tried to instill in both kids some sense of moral propriety. Seems to be working so far, and neither child shows any antisocial tendencies, although son and I often joke about it (”Don’t mess with me, man…I play violent video games, I could snap at any moment!!”).
I think a lot of the danger comes from allowing kids to be exposed to video game violence (or ANY kind of violence, for that matter) too soon. It CAN be desensitizing. I don’t know if there is some “magic age” at which certain games can be played, but I am TOTALLY in favor of ratings systems. They’re not perfect, but at least they serve as some sort of guideline. Give parents as much information about the game as possible, right down to plot lines, character traits, level of bad language, etc. so that they can make intelligent choices. Of course, some parents will persist in makng UNintelligent choices, but that’s up to them. My son was appalled the other day when he was at a local store and saw a parent buying GTA IV for their little boy, who couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8.
Anyway, this is all anecdotal and subjective, so your mileage may vary. But in summary, gaming can be a really positive thing. The complaint I’ve heard most often from young gamers is that their parents WON’T play video games WITH them.
One more thing: with the advent of the Nintendo Wii, I think parents no longer have an excuse. The Wii Sports games are GREAT family fun.
RE: Video games:
Imagine two scenarios:
(1) Little Johnny is shown by his (old-timer) grandpa how to make a whistle from a willow tree branch. In this process, Johnny is fidning a willow tree, sizing it up, finding a suitable branch, cutting if off (my apology to environmentalists), peeling the tree bark, making the necessary incisions,…, etc., and, voila — there is a working whistle (perhaps, on second, third,…, try). Johnny has to observe, record, and critically assess a number of unpredictable variables. Johnny becomes immersed, physically, mentally and emotionally, into the randomness of the Nature.
(2) Johnny is playing a video game. His hand and eye movements, his multiple-object tracking abilities are following, at best, the computer code written — once forever — by another human. By becoming very good at the game Johnny is becoming a better clone of another human. The context of Johnny’s mental development is largely defined by a certain piece of computer code.
Do you seen any difference between the two processes?
I think an analogy like this fails to get to the heart of anything, because it’s based on a false assumption of either/or. And its impetus is wishful rhetoric, not useful argument. I’d like Johnny to do both these things, if he’s lucky enough to have a grandpa who carves wood, although needless to say I don’t think your caricature of gaming is terribly accurate or useful.
New technology is different from old, and brings new benefits and new dangers. Think books, telephones, cameras, recorded music, if you prefer. It’s stupid to say that the new is simply better, of course, or that the loss of old skills is a good thing. But we don’t have the luxury of uninvention. We do, hopefully, have the luxury of raising our children and preaching what we think better or appropriate, but we have to do this within a world that isn’t going to bend around us, and that we aren’t going to bring any happy or lasting changes to if we stick our heads in the sand.
I actually rather agree about the use and dignity of physical labour, and of working physically with materials. Unless you’re Amish, however, whistle-carving isn’t going to see you through a happy, fulfilled life on its own.
There’s a factor you didn’t touch on, which is that as Andrew Hilton of the CSFI noted, games like “World of Warcraft” come with capitalism built in. My son is learning about money, exchange rates, guilds, supply and demand and all sorts of other things. I have to ration his time, obviously — he’s a teenage boy, but other than that I’m not sure I mind him playing this kind of game at all. And I love Guitar Hero too…
I saw this (http://eve.klaki.net/heist/ ) the other day and put me in mind of this article.
I would be impressed by an episode like this if it occurred in a long-running drama serial, let alone a computer game.
I might start playing them again.
u are bad people
[...] Tom Chatfield, Rage Against the Machines Do games stunt minds and create addictions? Good overview of what people really do when they sit down to play. “Games are human products, and lie within our control.†See readers’ comments here. [...]
thank a lot for you article, with this i understand that gaming have a lot of thing to learn from. i specially like discussion or arguement of game and learning. mean while i thought to my self hmm gaming now day still lack of creativeness, it make wonder how the future will like if the gaming industry continue to grow like this will the social pattern change, will we becoming lack of creativeness in sense of idea, will law enforment becoming strict till people will get a dead sentance because of online crime….
till then let hope the world change fo the best