[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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