"But so has and does every form of media, including this blog article. All of them have an agenda, in some cases better reasoned and orchestrated than in others, but at the end of the day they have an agenda. Media are a reflection of the culture of the place that produces them. The reason for so many violent and demeaning games is that they are produced by a culture that values both a glamourized version of military life and the objectification of women. Sadly, the state of affairs is that the vast majority of people have abandoned books and chosen Snooki as the place to get their culture."

Not right at all. Media and the culture are part of the same cycle, not separate from each other. It's not just because the culture wants something that media produces it - there are powers external to the culture that try to influence and modify it. Financial power and whatever it can by (including technology, which includes the technology of propaganda) can influence culture through a lot of means, and mass media is a pretty important part of that. America's Army or Top Gun or Modern Warfare etc are all supported by the army because they're awesome recruiting tools - they're not a passive reflection of culture, far from it: they're actively forming it. Similar to TV and video games. And behind these are legions of psychologists and engineers and marketing and PR experts, supported by tons of research, focus groups and large amounts of money in general, all working towards very similar goals, and often very consciously.

"Having said that, people like Anderson and the author of this post are ignoring the simple fact that a vast majority of game titles out there feature very little violence. The Sims franchise ( a virtual dollhouse), Wii Sports, and Farmville outsell most other game franchises out there, and the fact that these are doing positive things such as channeling massive donations to places like Haiti and Japan does not seem to register with them. Perhaps that message does not sell as well? "

Again, and again, and again: stop with the goddamn strawmen please. Of course there are non-violent games out there, but that does not change how many people play MW or BF or MoH etc and the influence this has on children. Read my other posts.

As for donations and so on: people are nice, and all industries, all charity leeches on that. Charity is an individual solution to a structural problem, and frankly, I find the "play for Japan" etc bullshit really hypocritical.

"And if you want an example of an educational game, just try almost anything made by Sid Meier, I bet a day playing Railroads would teach a kid more about business than the same day taking a business class."

Ugh. It may help a little, but overall, this is absolutely false. Most gaming "skills", apart from some limited manual skills are absolutely and obviously non-transferrable. I've played my share of sim games and I lead my share of projects and this idea is just ridiculous. It's on the same level of people claiming organising WoW raids as leadership experience. (What's somewhat true, in my personal experience, is that the way people play a game and their taste in games, as far as stories and genres go, reflects to a very small extent their approach to work.)

"America decided to cherish it's first ammendment even to it's logical extremes. If you don't like it, get involved in your local politics, make a difference that way. The author should do the same."

Again: you can't seriously believe that this is about free speech, that a game that sells 5.6 million copies on its first day (like Black Ops) is simply "free speech" and nothing else. You have to make a distinction between individual free speech which can in theory reflect an individual's opinion and thoughts (although it is often manipulative, just like corporate "speech") and corporate free speech which is *never* honest, can not, by its nature, reflect an "opinion" and "thoughts", because corporations don't have those - they reflect corporate *interests*, as seen through not debate but effective measurable quantities: sales, profits, popularity numbers, election outcomes. "Free speech" in the hands of a corporation ultimately has to boil down to manipulation.

The first amendment should be a protection for weak, powerless opinion against power concentration trying to supporess it - not another offensive tool in the arsenal of corporate concentration of power. Freedom of corporate speech just leads to restriction (marginalisation and devaluation) of individual speech. The question is whether you keep believing in this bullshit "principle": the idea that organisations are themselves individuals but on a higher level (a nice, elegant, idiotic philosophical system), or if you can look at reality as it is.

I'm not saying that there aren't great and pedagogically positive games at all, but they're sadly not the most widely played games. Believe me, I really love video games, even a lot of the stuff I consider bad. I've been gaming for thirty years now and I have a pretty large collection of several hundred games, but I still think that *as they exist*, their overall pedagogical effects are still negative. It's not a problem with the medium. It's a problem with the structure of the industry exploiting it - and it's the same problem that every other industry has. Video games as they are in this moment are imo in some respects powerful training and propaganda tools, but are not - at this moment at least - good for positive pedagogy, not because they're inherently bad, but because pedagogy is difficult and we know too little about it and it involves a lot of moral decisions and we simply don't have the knowledge we'd need to create those games yet - but in spite of this, people still use, without much restraint I might add, tools of manipulation and propaganda in video games.

I don't think deep strategy games and flight or train simulators (which, btw, almost always have an extremely strong community component, which I personally like a lot better than the communities that form in WoW and most other mmos) are the same as MW. But overall, the overwhelming majority of played video games do not require long term patience (some create a long term commitment through mentally exploitative methods, "engineered addictivity") or effort.

As for muds, if you were thinking of them, well, they're nice, but afaik, they're getting less and less popular, partly because of the increased popularity of mass produced MMO content and partly because of the increasing popularity of the social networks. On the topic of getting some kids to program, well...you know, this doesn't impress me, and I don't believe that's an actual achievement. I learned programming when I was around 10, on a ZX Spectrum, and it was, well, because I was the type of person who's better fit to be around computers than people. It was nice that I could control stuff and so on, and it was interesting. Motivating people like me to become programmers, well, I don't really think it's a big thing. It's fun for them and it's good for business. If you could have motivated me to be around real people and make real friends, now that would have helped :-) Programming is a good, sellable skill, and the market will be good to identify and exploit these; but if you show me a game that can choose and help make and motivate good teachers, I'll be convinced :-)

"And multiple player games, which are the most popular types of games anyway, do not have a simple view of the world, simply because the other player(s) you are playing with is / are human, and you have to behave yourself much as you would when interacting with other humans."

But still, if you look at raid videos, you'll still mostly see idiots shouting orders to others, as if they were in (what they think is) the military :-/ Mmos of course are somewhat different, because you do interact with people, but the EVE type games are pretty rare and and frankly, fringe games. Awesome though. Most people who play MMOs play WoW, and I absolutely agree with Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) about WoW's unethical approach towards players. The other people play shooter games online, and the social aspect of that is...not very nice. If you ever want to survey how (mostly American) kids curse and how they can handle defeat (or winning) or if you want to see racism and jingoism, just play a game or two of MW on Live with random people. Or play a bit of Uno with the xbox camera for the occasional nude idiot posing for minors :-) I mean, in my opinion that kind of "community" is in general not a positive thing. Of course gaming has good sides and awesome communities too, but imo they're not the majority. As for the really popular phone/facebook stuff...ugh.

And finally, if you look at what kind of "virtual realities" and communities of people create for themselves, well, you don't have to go further than, yes, you guessed it, Second Life. It's not like I have a problem with furries, they're some of the best targets for retarded cheap asshole humour, but, you know, it's a bit indicative of what an inward-turning, self-absorbed civilisation does with its free time. I mean, I don't really like Michael Albert's approach of designing a society, but at least it's about reality. It's a better way to spend your time than holding dark elf weddings in WoW or whatever. And seriously, working on creating a nice imaginary life instead of, you know, thinking about reality, well, I'm not sure that's all that awesome. Overall, I think that video games sucking up people's individual and community time is pretty awesome for a top down autocratic structure, and pretty bad for self-organisation and democracy in the long term. If religion is the opium of the masses, video games *as they are* are at least crack cocaine. Or maybe the other way around.

The majority of gamers are NOT children. The gaming industry generally targets people in their 20s-40s: people with disposable income and a bit of free time. Children have free time, but little disposable income.

It's easy: if it was all about the technology, and nothing else, with no economical and social structures behind it, it could be a question, because the technology itself is of course to some extent neutral. It could, theoretically, be used for good and bad. But if you look at how this kind of stuff is actually used in real society historically, you'll have to have doubts, or rather, you'll be able to guess pretty well what the effects will be.

Again, it's not about the technology itself (mainly, although the way it develops is indeed partly socially determined), but the way it's used. For example, you could, in theory, use the internet for distributed democratic decisionmaking, which is something that almost everyone I knew thought of immediately when they learned of the Internet. Or you could use it to sell stuff. Or go back to industrial automation: you could use it to give more control over production and more free time to workers - or you could use it to take away their authority over the production process and reduce them into cogs and reduce their cost (pay) and *decrease* their free time by devaluing their work and thus forcing them to work more. Or basically any mass communication media. And the list could go on and on and on.

People say technology is "amoral" (sometimes they use it for people, but people are not "amoral", they're immoral), and to some extent, to the extent that it depends on reality, it is. But there are always human choices not just in design but in its use and the structures it's integrated into. So it's actually pretty logical, if you look at the historical choices, to think they're not going to be used in ways that increase human happiness etc.

I assume it can't be good because children need to understand the real world, how to manipulate it and how to survive in it with its billions of billions of interactions per second, with its randomness and variety. No matter how clever or virtual the game gets, it is still less than the real deal. Therefore we are failing to teach the children what the real world is, what it requires and as a consequence not giving the children a chance to know real relationships, real nature, real experiences in order to hone their intelligence, analytical skills and reflexes to function in the real world.

Already, I see kids and adults walking into things and tripping while they are walking on the streets with their eyes glued to the console. How will they learn to be observant and alert human beings? How will they learn to care about others if no one cares for them except their game console? How will they learn to ask questions when the only answers are already determined by a limited sub-set of reality? So yes, I do assume it cannot be good.

"But in reality, you won't have access to the important day-to-day information that helps you think about the economy and society more deeply and realistically"

You will. You just won't be spoonfed it.

" you won't have free and unlimited access to research results"

Compared to 30 years ago? 25 years ago? 30 years ago, how easy was it for someone who did to access research articles, nevermind the results themselves, unless they themselves worked in that particular field?

"you won't be able to easily reuse and transform "intellectual property" owned by corporations. And despite all results of intellectual work costing an arm and a leg, the actual creators won't be able to live off their own products unless they sell themselves to a concentration of power that does nothing but leeches off people's work and exploits them.
.."

Maybe. At least in music, it increasingly looks like the future, for musicians, is in live performance, not making studio recordings (given the ease of making lossless copies of music). At least in music, it increasingly looks like the corporations are pissing in the wind when it comes to IP.

When I talk about games and gaming, I'm not referring to phone games used to waste time while you are waiting for public transport, or facebook games played while you should be working / studying. I'm referring to games bought / installed / subscribed to, seriously played.

"They're designed, very well btw, for exploiting people and mostly to make them pay real money for virtual crap. They're often lacking any kind of proper gameplay and are just straight out timewasters "

Oh I agree.

"So, more and more gaming time is indeed spent with what are called "casual games", which covers more of women and of course older people too, but the problem with these games shifts from violence and aggression to insidious, exploitative, manipulative, addictive game mechanics"

I think you are underestimating the number of serious women, and older (ie not a testosterone poisoned teenager) gamers, and overestimating the number of serious (testosterone poisoned) teenaged gamers. IME, RPGs attact a lot of women and older gamers.

"of course the entire traditional market is now under the influence of this casual wave (with Microsoft's Kinect and the Playstation Move"

I'm going to go off on a tangent, here, but MS's Kinect does actually have pedagogical / knowledge uses. It is being used, by among others, biomechanicists and sports scientists to try to do (human) movement / biomechanical analysis (because it is cheap, relative to the specialised equipment normally used; of course its cheapness does come with flaws, the slow frame rate limits what can be done with it)

" The current largest franchise in the American video game industry is in fact Modern Warfare, and there's no question about the military using games for recruitment and the general propaganda effect of these games. That gaming extends to a more diverse and larger audience now has no relevance to this fact imo. I don't agree with blaming the medium at all, but we must be very critical of the way the medium is used, especially because it's so incredibly (and obviously) powerful.
.."

Well yeah, I agree with this. We shold certainly be critical about how gaming is used to propagandise war. But, this is an issue that pervades throughout not just gaming, but much of popular entertainment, and even society. War propaganda occurs in TV / movies, it occurs in sports, it occurs in news, in how reporters report. Anything with mass popularity, that has mass coverage has been permeated by war propaganda.

My comlaint with the article is that it is too shallowly written. Someone like you would have written a better one.

"With this out of the way, it's also completly obvious that a lot of (probably most) video games aren't even in the free speech category. They're corporate products that do not want to engage in dialogue, have nothing to do with critical thinking and democratic engagement, but just the opposite: their effect is in fact stifling free speech and discussion, not a part of it."

Just like many movies.

I think the rating system for games should be enforced (like movies).