A Battle Is Won But The Cultural War Goes On

This ruling, the latest string in a series of legal successes for the game industry, points out that our problems are not judicial. Ultimately, the problem is that while gamers are today on average in their late 20s, and gaming as a pastime is widely popular throughout Generations Y and X, it is still widely perceived by those who hold political power as “for children”. Broadly speaking, politicians’ and policymakers’ reaction to video games is skewed by the lens of their relationship to video games: They don’t play them, their kids do, and so they react accordingly. The cultural war around video games will continue until one of the following occurs: To drill down on this latter point, the current strategy to demonstrate that games have adult players seems to be to lump in as many older and female gamers as possible by placing online chess, pogo, bejeweled, and the like into the discussion. Unfortunately, this undermines the cause more than it helps it, because it seems to say that the games that adults like don’t include ultra-violence or sexual content. Instead, what needs to happen is that the maturity of the audience for games like GTA needs to be demonstrated — what is the average age of the GTA player, really? At the same time, games that can artistically be compared to the likes of, say, Memento, need to be held up by the industry.