> There are videogame plots, which often involve sinister
> super-corporations and have a left tinge, but there's also the formal
> experience of playing, which tends to necessarily emphasise individual
> heroes struggling to suppress evil mass movements, or at least masses
> of moving cyborg goblins. Games which emphasise solidarity over
> individualism are difficult to implement on a practical level and
> often boring to play. The SimCity games did not actually simulate a
> city, but the experience of being some kind of weird dictator
> mayor-for-life who can demolish and rezone structures by decree and
> who lives forever. "Massively multiplayer" online games tend to
> promote the formation of small entrepreneurial units - corporations or
> "guilds", usually with the goal of accumulation by dispossession,
> although I think the space-sim EVE has a fairly complex economy which
> includes mining, share trading, and variable levels of state economic
> intervention by the robo space police.
>
> Co-op shooters encourage squad-level solidarity but also normalise the
> idea of arbitrary, let's-you-and-him-fight Punch-and-Judy battles,
> much like the violent team sports that elite private schools force on
> their students, the future military officer class, to habituate them
> to immediate commitment to pointless wars of aggression. "America's
> Army", the highly dodgy recruitment tool developed and released by the
> US Army, has the best immanent critique of this. Players participate
> in a battle between US soldiers and "terrorists" who carry
> Kalashnikovs and don't wear uniforms. But obviously the game designers
> couldn't have players identifying with the terrorist team or having
> fun blowing up Yankee soldiers -- so whichever team you join appears
> on your computer as the US Army, and your enemies as the terrorists.
> When a player kills an enemy terrorist (who sees him/herself as an
> American soldier), they can pick up the corpse's AK-47, but the
> instant they touch it the gun will metamorphose into an M16. The game,
> to avoid implying that it's fun to be a militiaman killing Americans,
> ends up making the argument that there is no serious distinction
> between the United States and its "terrorist" enemies beyond
> superficialities of clothing and quality of equipment.
>
> Cheers
>
> CWS
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
Not to mention the very basic fact that most video games are the electrical equivalent of a human shaped punching bag... I'm not dissing them, but revolutionary they are not...
However, some of the storylines do have elements which are extremely impressive. Final Fantasy VII, which I grew up on, involved a young man finding his identity through teaming up with a radical enviromental group bent on the overthrow of an evil corporation who were fucking shit up. On another level, the Fallout games (the old ones, not sure about the new ones) push the player to make independent ethical choices, many of which are difficult and ambiguous.
I get the impression that the video games industry is one with so much potential but with so few talented and creative writers. All the energy seems to be channeled into making "shit cooler" and explosions bigger, which, while can be fun at times, can get rather boring... Its a real pity...