Noah Balmer

This article discusses they different 'games' tribal cultures play and how videogames in our culture fill the same need for present day humans. They provide a release of tension for the player. The game is a place where you have freedom to do things you normally arnt aloud to do. The author describes it as "a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland, or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives. For example, tearing someones arm off and beating them to death with it. I believe that different types of games act as different escapes. a first person shooter lets you get out pent up aggression. A game like World of Warcraft lets you be a magical character that you are not in real life. Other games help relax your mind such as Electroplankton or Flow. The article also discusses war ass a game of kings. This is a very sad truth. I often wondered why waring countries couldnt just have a winner takes all Unreal Tournament Capture the Flag game in which the winner acutally wins what the war would have won them. The loser loses but is still alive with no need to rebuild his country. The author also talks about art in relation to games. Many games that I enjoy are critques of our modern world. Grand Theft Auto has been publicly shunned as a game of extreme violence and bad taste. Actually playing the game leaves the gamer to decide what is right, and the authors at Rockstar Games took the game to new levels by using it as an exgagerated look at the world we are living in. The author discusses if games are mass media. They conclude the answer is yes and I agree with them. And its getting bad. It costs so much to create a game for a system as resource hungry as a PS3, xbox360, or PC that it is too risky to create a game that doesnt have mass appeal. This is the same way with movies in 2007. This is why we see sequel after sequel of any game that is popular.