Can Videogames Save The World?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952262,00.html

In a recent Time Magazine article by Stephan Faris, it is suggested that with the strong impact of videogame culture, creators are slowly beginning to promote more positive beliefs within the context of what are currently violent games. There has been a slow shift / introduction from these aggressive antics to playing addictive games which place the gamer in a situation that promotes ‘saving our own world.’

As mentioned in class, with the videogame industry being bigger than that of the film industry itself, the values presented in games such as “Grand Theft Auto” (in particular picking up and killing prostitutes) are questionable as to their influence on the youth of today. What we are now beginning to see is the inclusion of world issues that perhaps give the gamer the sense of agency in the way that they are in fact saving our own planet. School children have been aimed at by the UN World Food Programme with a game entitled “Food Force” which places the players in the situation of fighting a food scarcity. And with growing videogame addiction and repetition, the hopes of such creators are that the moral beliefs will stick with the younger generation as they grow and continue to change our world for the better.

We see another popular example of this in an educational MTV Game “Darfur Is Dying” in which players must gather water as refugees in order to survive. As the game increased in popularity (of over 700,000 players), the article notes the growing trend of such games, and the new outline of ethics that are encoded and marketed for the gamer audience, in the hopes to spread this message.