Games as Activism

What follows is a from a blog I frequent -- "We Make Money not Art" -- it deals with activism, art, free speech. The following thread is quite interesting. It was started by a discussion of an academic conference on Gaming, but It further illustrates that gaming has morphed into a legitimate narrative form, much like what happened to film in the early part of the 20th century. I think in the light of the recent article on why British kids can't read, we have to think about not just the excesses of the application of technology to teaching, but what literacy really means.

Sample paragraph:

The main public for these games is neither teenagers nor kids, but adults. Moreover, the rules of these games are not the ones you would encounter in a commercial games: the aim is not to attract as many game addicts during as much time as possible; to captivate with an aesthetics as realist as possible or with the most original design; to attain as much identification to the hero as possible; to be the most competitive on the market; to satisfy the ego of the teenager that still lurks in each of us by killing what moves on the screen... the aim is not to win. The aim is to subvert and parody preconceived ethics and aesthetics; to generate reflection.

Start here:

And then here:

And then, finally, here:

--hal