I leave tonight on a short business trip, gotta check in with the mothership and visit a client. So I’ll have limited access to my blog, which is a pain. There is also a little matter of a book that’s being released over the weekend, which might further cut into my blogging time.

However, there are a few items to discuss before I leave…

Item the first
I couldn’t get the video on this to work, but CCTV (in China) is reporting on how Video games focus on growing women players. It’s not a particularly in-depth article, glossing over the same ground we’ve covered over and over again. And because they keep covering the same ground, it may appear that they are running in circles — which isn’t helped with quotes like this:

Sharon Knight, general manager of European Online Business Electronic Arts, said, “I think that women have some of the same needs as men, they want to be engaged intelligently, they want to be challenged in their game play. Women and men are increasingly time pressured, so their looking for experiences they can get in and out quickly, they can choose when to play, how much time to devote to game playing versus another form of entertainment. I think that women are potentially more interested in community, and chat, and relationship based games a bit more than first person shooters for example.”

(Obviously, she didn’t see the report showing that girls aren’t that much less likely to play violent videogames than boys) Not to mention a few of our Horde women might take exception to the more docile tone that EA tries to paint us with. But oh well.

Item the second
The Guardian runs and interesting but woefully brief article on gaming creating a two-tier society. I was interested in the theories Johnson is putting forth, but can’t really take them to the same conclusions he does:

But given the research mentioned, will we end up with a divided society? Imagine a future internet where games players have a massive advantage over ordinary users. Will we see a divide between the visually literate and those who just don’t (or can’t) get it?

I think that videogames are shown to improve visual coordination and logic — not weed out people who are good at this stuff from people who aren’t. It’s not so much of an abilities gap as it is an interest and generation gap. Since videogames are seen as recreational and ergo voluntary, there will be a short-term advantage afforded to gamers during the onset of this new digital 3D Snowcrash technotopia that Johnson suggests is just around the corner, but just as net literacy is considered mandatory for living in today’s society, so will be visual acuity in the New Net World, so it’s just going to be a matter of some people playing catch-up.

Item the Third
The Telegraph runs an interesting opinion article about the one-sidedness of gaming controversies. Again, nothing new is really being discussed in this article, but it is nice to see someone batting for our team in the Mainstream Media (for a change).

A lot of the moral hand-wringing that takes place on this latter issue comes from a desire to defend the innocence of children. While this is a noble motive in itself, it stems from a generally held ignorance of the video game industry. It’s a position that doesn’t take into account that the age of the average gamer has risen dramatically over the years and the content of some games has become vastly more mature. In short, not all video games (believe it or not) are aimed at children – in fact many of them have adults squarely in their sights as their target market.

I’ll pop in when I can, play nice now!

Mighty Ponygirl posted this entry on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and filed it under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.