Vid games: violence? Nah -characters are overcompensates

There's a lot of moral panic and other sillinesses about video games. This article does a nice job of examining what some of the bigger-picture issues are rather than the shallow-knee-jerkers.
For example, a bit of truth-telling, getting past the cultural mythology:

games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliche, but there's no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that. Every pixel of Modern Warfare 3 oozes machismo. It's all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other's legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It's about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

Okay, so some of the comments can be a bit catty; but I guess that's part of trying to puncture the bubble of myth, but it makes a good point:

Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it's like a soap opera set in a ballet school.

The disappointment is that this is about as far as the critique goes. That last quote seemed to promise a further consideration of the kinds of relating and assumptions that are being modelled and fostered. And then it would be a mere hop and a skip to noting that the metanarrative hooks into the myth of redemptive violence and considering how bad that is as a model for interpersonal relationships ...
Ah well, it looks like I may have done it after all.

Charlie Brooker: The trouble with video games isn't the violence. It's that most of the characters are dicks | Comment is free | The Guardian

Good games aren't zero-sum, beggar-your-neighbour

It would seem that my gaming disposition shares much with the Germans. Since I was little I have hated Monopoly: it takes ages which isn't a problem in some games but in monopoly it is ages of either grinding your opponents into penury or (more often) being ground down by the inevitable. No-one enjoys contemplating such certainty for so long (do they?). In addition it rewards the least likeable traits of human beings and so tends not to build community but rather greed, heart-heartedness, lack of empathy, envy and schadenfreud. The German way of gaming is different, and much more likely to help people like me who find the all-or-nothing, winner takes all nature of some games a bit much to handle and hard to justify in terms of ethical formation.

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Which is best for community formation and neighbourly charity, do you think?

Gameful, positive impact gaming

I've been spending time recently in the company of some little people who are delightful in many ways. But I found myself reflecting this morning on how thoroughly their imaginations seem to have been colonised by martial-arts and televisual violence (think: Power Rangers, SHS, etc). The difficulty being that these forms of imaginary fighting are heavily based on individual strength and agility, make a rather arbitrary demarcation between goodies and baddies (ie they are like two football teams rather than being divided by values and commitments) and rather contextless (again rather like sports contests).

So I found myself worrying about the way that, in conversation about some of WWII, they seemed to think that a solution to Nazi presence would be to act violently towards German soldiers in a 'superhero' sort of way. Many of their scenarios began with 'What if ...'. At one point I felt I had to say to them that if one of a village did hit a soldier then that would actually result in everyone in the village being punished and many people being beaten up. I didn't press the point but, listening to them, I was becoming more and more disturbed by the way that fantasy violence was so disconnected from the world of systematic oppression and how the ideology of 'redemptive violence' was being laid down in imagination in ways quite divorced from reality. This is, in itself, quite an interesting reflection on arguments about just wars or otherwise: we need to recognise that too many people have an image of what it is about that is simply not robust enough to recognise the real brutalities and miseries.

So that's why I think it is good that some people are trying to produce imaginatively engaging games that don't continue to feed the memes of fantasy violence.
Check it out:
With a hat-tip to those lovely people at Worldchanging.
GAMEFUL, a Secret HQ for Worldchanging Game Developers by Jane McGonigal — Kickstarter: "Gameful is an online 'Secret HQ' where you can connect with other people who believe in the power of games to make us better and change the world.

It will be a free resource -"

War on Terror, the board game

So, since Risk has become 'Landgrab' on Facebook, perhaps we'll see a Facebook version of this: War on Terror, the board game: "WAR ON TERROR, THE BOARDGAME: It's got suicide bombers, political kidnaps and intercontinental war. It's got filthy propaganda, rampant paranoia and secret treaties and the Axis of Evil is a spinner in the middle of the board"
Let me know if you spot it before I do.

Sony apologise to Manchester Cathedral

I blogged a number of days ago about this and it seems that Sony have begun to do the right thing. An pertinent further consideration is mentioned in this report (which did occur to me at the time of the first report).

When larger organisations like Sony find their copyright has been breached, they are very quick to use the law. When Sony used images of Manchester Cathedral as part of a game which extolled gun violence, it was not only in bad taste: it was also very, very insulting

Sony apologises for Cathedral game

Gunfight in the Cathedral

Apparently a gaming company (Sony, no less) unwisely used the interior of Manchester Cathedral as a virtual venue for a chapter in a shoot-em-up game. You can see footage on You Tube. The cathedral staff were upset and I can understand why (though one of my sons is unconvinced about why when we discussed it the other day.) For me the issue is both the portrayal of violence which is promulgating an ideology/mythology -redemptive violence- which is at odds with the Cross as well as the issue of permission being sought to use a public building in this way. Film-makers get proper permission even when they are only using bits in a composite (eg Harry Potter where Durham, Christchurch (Oxford) and Hereford Cathedrals are used). The dean of the cathedral said that it "can only be described as virtual desecration.” Now that's a relatively new idea and might not be a good one: do we worry about novels where such things are described? On the whole not. I guess the new factor is the graphic portrayal and use of images without permission in a context that is so inimical to a fundamental Christian themes of belief. As the dean goes on to say, citing the work of the cathedral against gun culture in Manchester and the aim of their work is to help young people

“to appreciate an alternative to the violence that they experience in their daily lives. . . Seeing guns in Manchester Cathedral is not the sort of connection we want them or anyone to make. For a global manufacturer to re-create the interior of any religious building such as a mosque, synagogue, or, in this case, a cathedral with photo-realistic quality, and then encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and, in our view, highly irresponsible.”

Google Video result for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMscR1IS-E
Check also the article in the Church Times.

Technorati Tags: cathedral, gaming, violence

So that's what you call it

"'counterfactual thinking,' or the re-imagining of major historical events, with the variables slightly tweaked."
Interestingly enough, it's this kind of fiction that has made me more interested in real history. But on the basis of this article, I'm thinking that the computer game might be really interesting. Of course, such a game is only as good as the parameters fed in at the start: gigo is still the rule.
Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games: MAKING HISTORY®: The Calm & the Storm is a true grand strategy game that puts players in control of global conflict,

Good games guide

I've always been a bit of a fan of board games [how deeply uncool is that?] The exception is Monopoly -it's so dispiriting once you start to lose because there really is no way to beat the snowball effect of increasing wealth -which was the educational point of the game, I understand. The only way I found to make it variable was a tweak of the rules allowing the banker to tax income or transactions which led me to a happy hour or so trying to redistribute income and come up with a progressive tax regime, much more interesting.
Anyway, this kind of a web page is really good; what games are out there? Well there are these and there is a link to further resources. Remember Civ started as a rather good board game ...
The Morning News - The 2004 Good Gift Games Guide