The gravity caused by this game has prompted many developers to move their game’s launch dates so as not to clash and, presumably, burn in the charts.
“The level of excitement for Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 coming out of E3 well exceeded our expectations and therefore we have decided to move Raven’s upcoming sci-fi first person action title, Singularity, from 2009 to Q1 2010… (Activision)”
Obviously this means that all sorts of people who never normally play games start to pontificate on the release and try to say something about it.
The BBC is one such non-gamer organisation and this morning they dragged a man with a pony tail out of bed, slapped a suit on him and tried to sound at all like they know anything.
In this they have a problem; gaming is now bigger than movies. The sort of people who watch BBC news avoid games in general, but damn that’s a lot of money being made. That’s the definition of mainstream. This game is the biggest release of the year. What did they say in such circumstances?
Its so called negative effect on children.
What ?
Well, on one level you play an anti-terrorism unit trying to save an airport from destruction.
Apparently, that means children will become psychopaths.
But isn’t it an 18 release? That doesn’t matter says the Ponytail-man. Kids will simply pirate it. The presenter, who probably has never seen an Xbox, tutted and shook her head. Boy, what a nightmare she seemed to say.
A couple of points:
1. It’s not the developers fault if stores sell to those underage.
2. It’s not the developers fault if parents buy it for those underage.
3. It’s not the developers fault that pirates put it on the boards, or that parents allow their kids to download warez.
4. Here comes the most important point:
Modern life contains many images of guns and uses of force as positive representations of power. Consider the wars we are in, the TV news full of images of our society kicking the snot out of weaker ones. These are things kids are exposed to all the time. They have idiots like Blair saying that guns are not cool, but then he launches attacks on people in Afghanistan.
The point is this: Cod:MW2 is down with this. It is along for the ride. It presents the same message as our government. One drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. One that says that we are always the good guys and that any other point of view is extremist.
Don’t fool yourself into believing that this game says anything not said in every newscast, paper and official news channel all the time.
It’s not the developer’s fault that modern society is ordered this way.
If the press wants to complain about games, they should go after sick (i.e. not something representing society’s norms) games like Madworld, which was on Wii for Dao’s sake!
Regards,
Basho
1 fine article here here!