Games people play (continued)

My last post was cut off, just as I was saying something rude about Hollywood! Either I was censored, or I wittered on for too long. Here’s what I can remember of the rest.

“So whereas films kept us in touch with naivety and hope, and were an antidote to cynicism, video games keep us in touch with engagement and ownership and are an antidote to exclusion and silence.”
Hmmm… I’m going to interpret “silence” here as not having a voice and being disempowered as a result, rather than the silence that we desperately need and is desperately lacking in today’s western world.

Andy’s argument here follows on from the previous quote. I confess I have little idea what he is talking about, regarding both films and games. If Hollywood is not cynical in the way it feeds unrealistic pap to the masses, then I’m a 9ft-tall blue alien.

Regarding the inclusivity of gaming, one of the comments on Andy’s TEDxExeter talk was:  “Now I want to engage with ‘Flower’ (but I’ll need a PS3 first…)”. Now a Playstation 3 console costs about £230 on Amazon, and then there’s the cost of the games. There’s a substantial barrier right there, especially when compared with the availability of free reading in the library or a film for £7. There are plenty of online games, of course, but I’m not sure that it would be allowed to play them on library computers – shhh! So I want to know what you mean by antidote, Andy, and how it would work. Thanks!

I think there was one more quote and response, but I’m afraid it’s gone for ever now. So instead, I want to add a bit of explanation of why I stopped playing games. Well, that’s easy – I had no time at university, and computers were at a premium. But why didn’t I start again when I got a job, and PCs etc were becoming more readily available? Because I saw one of my colleagues playing what I think was Doom in his lunchbreak, and thought it utterly repulsive. And because I was making my way through Eliot, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc etc. So there we are.