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[Reminder: check out the Knight Project page for the first report on my latest animation project.]
EA games made the headlines last week with the announcement that the latest version of its Medal of Honor series would allow gamers to play as the Taliban and, of course, kill American soldiers. Click here to watch the Linkin Park-backed trailer in all of its bodycounting glory.
This comes fresh on the back of the announcement that Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 is officially the best-selling game of all time in the UK. Fox News jumped feet first into the melee, bringing a grieving Gold Star Mother into the studio to comment (watch the video here), but enough people have commented on the polemic for me not to go into a equally predictable defense of art imitating life. Instead, what I want to focus on here is the rise of the videogame as an increasingly sophisticated (not to mention supremely lucrative) art form. And most importantly, ask why we aren’t waking up to the potential that video games like Modern Warfare or Medal of Honor represent for news reporting? Scrolling through the comment thread at Gamrfeed’s original article on the issue, Puffy’s comment says it all:
I really don’t understand the argument here.. I mean this is a purely fictional piece of entertainment that is based on real events. Do these media types this that when people play these games in multiplyer [sic] they think, oh good, I wanna be the Taliban and kill some Americans? It’s just a name and outfit to distinguish your teammates from the enemy team, gamers don’t give a shit who they’re playing as in these titles.
What we need to do is redress the balance of this sort of technology being used for pure entertainment purposes and think about how an interactive, immersive digital environment would be the ideal way to introduce students/viewers to the reality of what life is like on the ground in Afghanistan/Iraq/ war zones. Patrick Farley’s doing a similar, albeit deliberately hyper-fictionalised and stylised version of Afghanistan (using 3D rendering tools) over at electricsheepcomix, which I highly recommend. Gamrfeed later ran an excellent piece featuring interviews with US military personnel on the issue, which you can read here. Just as we’ve seen with comics, too many of the supposed gatekeepers of culture see videogames as just another form of lowbrow entertainment and not a state of the art opportunity to engage with an audience on a totally new level. To that end, what do you think is the average age of a videogamer? Answers in the comments section…
