Are games too juvenile?
March 30, 2009 by Jin
Filed under Games, Jin's Corner, Recent
It’s not often that the game industry receives a general dressing down and have it stick. At the last day of the Game Developer’s Conference, Heather Chaplin, a journalist who has been covering gaming for eight years for such media outlets like NPR, addressed the gaming industry at large. Calling games in general deeply stunted in guy culture, Chaplin stated that the gaming industry is too old to simply rehash zombies, aliens and girls in metal bikinis wielding axes.
According to Pixelvixen707:
Like Wendy slapping around the lost boys, Chaplin patiently but firmly laid down the line. “It is you guys as game designers who are mired deeply in ‘guy culture,’” Chaplin said. The problem isn’t the medium: “You are a bunch of stunted adolescents.” Games avoid any of the things that separate men from boys: responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery. And “when you’re talking about culture-makers, this is a problem.”
Criticisms of the gaming industry have been made before, but rarely at the developers themselves at the conference dedicated to them. Certainly a market argument can be made that video games, like movies and music, caters to the tastes of its audience. In recent years, games featuring the aforementioned zombies, aliens and metal bikinis have often done well.
I take no sides on this issue. I enjoy a lot of the “schlock” that Chaplin criticizes, but acknowledge her point. I’m interested to hear your opinion on this.
From Pixelvixen707 via Game Politics.
