Gaming - Boring, but Good? Or Bad?

Gaming isn’t that interesting to some of us. I don’t like it myself. I used to play a few games, several years ago. I played F1, Eradicator, some sort of cross country race game, a motocross game, even a Flash golf game (can you believe that?). I’ve played Doom and Lara Croft, I’ve played that game where you drive over all the pedestrians and get points for killing people (Armageddon?). Nowadays thankfully I have more of a life.

The weird thing is, the games industry makes more money than the film industry. Much more money than the music industry (what’s left of it). The gaming industry makes more money than any other entertainment industry. It’s where every kid on the block heads when they want to have fun, good clean fun. And the finance men love that, cos it’s making them a huge wad, for little investment. Good games are produced by people with lots of ideas but no business sense. So it’s a neat equation, idea=money, with no complications.

 

But gaming is being blamed for a few problems too. The current new spate of kid shoot em up’s going on in US schools is largely put at the door of games. Kids turning into lumps of lard is blamed on gaming. Kids being anti-social gimps who only talk and interact through myspace and youtube is blamed on gaming culture too, via the evil interweb. Evil rock music spreads it’s evil message through kill bill style game scenarios, so real that you think it’s happening to you, or at least your kid.

 

Where will it end? Will your kid/you be shot at school by some weirdo dressed like a desparado imitating some old cowboy hero in a technicolor leather coat, with AK47s under both arms? Check out the evidence, or watch the Zero Hour at Columbine High Documentary.

 

So, while the RIAA is still taking poor single mothers to court over a few MP3s, the gaming industry money men look the other way while their products ‘confuse’ the younger generation into thinking that moral code means a new web page design. Or something. Allegedly. Don’t expect a conclusion here, this is an ongoing train of thought.