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

Pop­ular­ity: 2% [?]

Related Posts

• Sins Of A Solar Empire : Mul­ti­player Review
  I am going to review Sins Mul­ti­player by recount­ing a game I played against my friends Jim and Kiero…
• Game of the Year or Year of the Game?
  Game Of The Year Awards! In the his­tory of gam­ing there have been many golden years, but there has …