Gaming has been on the rise in Korea for a few years now, but it looks like their market is even stronger than initially expected. Pearl Research forecasts the online games market in South Korea will even exceed $1.7 billion by 2009. They believe this is driven by new releases and a “fervent” gaming culture.
I’ve seen the above video several times, but decided to go ahead and post it since we didn’t have it here on Kezins. In addition to video game news, we like to throw in anything odd we can find on the web concerning Asian culture. If you are familiar with Calbee, you already know they always have some seriously wacky commercials.
I am sure most of you have already heard that Jack Thompson walked out on his hearing today. As a result of walking out, it looks like Florida is going to move for “advanced” disbarment” according to Kotaku which means he’ll more than likely lose his right to practice law in Florida for 10 years. On the surface this seems like a huge victory for gamers, but I almost feel sorry for Jack at this point. Part of me wants to believe that he at least means well, even though he’s seriously misguided concerning video games. Before walking out on his hearing today, he left the Florida Supreme Court with a lengthy note titled ‘Thompson’s Formal Objection To June 4 Sanctions “Hearing”. In the end, it’s fairly obvious that Jack Thompson’s career in law is coming to a slow and strange end, but it really doesn’t change anything. If you have a little time, you might want to check it out:
[Editor's note: Cursed with hardware failure, "Xper" returns from a PC-less void of confusion with his usual feminist and socialist rant about why we should care about games. Are we looking at a returning theme, or perhaps a series?]
“Yeah looks promising, I just wish they sexed up the character a bit.” - Excerpt from a NeoGaf forum discussion about Mirror’s Edge.
Looking at the first in-game footage of one of DICE’s next-gen efforts Mirror’s Edge made me think that this might be a step toward turning hardcore games into acceptable mainstream consumption material. I am not talking about Wii-mainstream, I’m talking about turning “hardcore” game mechanics (first-person mode games with heavy action elements) into something more than point-shoot-cover-gameplay that is so heavily rooted in the “young male” target audience. Making a game that builds on previous genres, only transfering it from a dark and un-welcoming space into a colorful, bright world where less is king and maturity can’t be patronized. The world and concept alone of Mirror’s Edge made me feel hopeful; the in-game footage turns my heart into a pounding hammer. But when a thread on NeoGaf, and many many others, quickly turned into a debate about the protagonist’s “attributes”, the hope and heart pounding excitement in me turned into anxiety.
What we discussed a few weeks ago about the trailer for Resident Evil 5, and why we should care about what games present to us and how they depict certain imagery, had to do with games becoming so big a part of our multimedia culture that simple common sense about racism and gender issues has to be dealt with the same caution other mediums have a responsibility to do. Making the compromise that art actually does have a responsibility and cannot be divorced from social and historical context, we have to start taking games more seriously and making sure we as gamers and not mocked in the process of becoming mainstream. Being mocked, however, is the least of our concerns; molding society and forming our culture are our prime responsibilities as gaming enthusiasts. So ask yourself, then; is “sexing” up the main character of Mirror’s Edge a good step for us to take?
[Editor's note: in the second part of our two part interview with Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at Stockholm university, we discuss why the message games send out are important to our culture, and touch on racism and gender issues with Resident Evil 5 and Grand Theft Auto IV as backdrops]
The medium is the message
The famous quote from late media analyst Marshall McLuhan is being uttered when the argument that the trailer is clearly playing off of horror concepts come up. The trailer is obviously, for a lack of a better term, cool. It is professionally edited and effective at provoking a horror sensation throughout the film. But why do we so seldom in the videogame culture stop to think about why a certain aspect of something is cool? It’s just cool and that’s good enough, it seems. Games are being excused because they are “just games.”
The way the message is being transported is the interesting thing, not the message itself, according to McLuhan’s theories. We live in the “global village”, and the technology has to be viewed as an artifact, a cultural artifact.
- Both when we choose a message and when we send out this message, can we ever assume that this message is going to be received as we intended it to. But, we can assume that we somewhat share the same understanding of cultural codes within said culture. “I am formed by the culture and I am forming the culture”.
We will never be able to mediate a message without it having a cultural significance or connection, and in turn we interpret that from our own cultural baggage. No matter how “fair” you depict a fighting scene between a white and a black person, we will always apply constellations that he is black.
The gaming culture has been a small subgenre in the past, and because of that, according to Mogren, such issues that dealt with gender or ethnicity never “needed” to be lifted to a higher cultural standpoint, because they were, in fact, “just games”. The notion that we don’t need to explain anything or take responsibility because we’re all in the same boat and understand each other is now getting erased. Times have changed, and now every grandmother is aware that her grandchild is playing this computer game called World of Warcraft. Games are forming the culture we all are participating in on a daily basis in this century.
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