Games
September 23, 2005 at 11:05 
Games. Ok, I grew up in East Germany and not only was I not raised on Nintendo but there was really hardly any contact with computer games, which were identified as weapons in class struggle and thus deleted from computers imported from "the West." The assumption was that games were installed on these machines to slow down our productivity. Still today, I'm not personally hooked on games but I enjoy, sometimes, seeing the enthusiasm around me. Earlier this year I wrote a short entry on Discordia about gaming after a web cam session with Tim Lenoir. Surely the world of stereotypes that surrounds gaming drives many aficionados, at least in an academic context, into a defensive position. The notions of gamers as lonely, obese and socially escapist teenage boys who lock themselves up in their parent's basement are as wrong as the initial assumption that email socially alienates people by default. The work of scholars like Barry Wellman demonstrated that. There is no need to list growing market shares outdoing cinema box office successes, emerging MFA programs in Game Studies, and history of game design courses and surveys that report 50% of gamers being women around 30. The fact that games are a significant part of the lives of so many people in the "developed world" is obvious. News reports of Korean youngsters dying after extended game sessions or couples neglecting their baby child over World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) hit the public occasionally. I also remember meeting a young Serbian man in Belgrade a few years ago who lowered his shades during the NATO bombing in 1999 and played games, probably manufactured in the US, for the 79 days of the air raids. There are many different gaming worlds established and art games and critical gaming blogs have their audiences but the main stream games like the ones shown in this trade show (left) seem to be dominated by commercial first-person shooter narratives. There are, of course, many critical and non-violent games and considerable research interest is dedicated to this area. But, yesterday I witnessed a games trade show at SUNY Buffalo, which confirmed many of the stereotypes. The selection of games called for its own 
audience-- except one middle aged female company representative who stood at the entrance, the floor was packed with young men entangled in America's Army. There was not even one single curious female student. Are they really all at home socializing in Second Life? Not even one woman got lost there or was drawn to even have a look because a DJ was spinning the turn tables.
Student interest in gaming is probably also related to the fact that they think that they'll strike it rich as game designers. It's a similar drive that pushes lots of German students back into painting school as the perceived resurgence of painting locates the money right there on the easel. "New Media" programs there now can't fill their classrooms. I love the cultural trend towards gaming-- that applies game and play to culture in general. There is, of course, a rich tradition of that from the Surrealists to the Situationist Dérive and gaming was one of the first uses of the Internet. In the end, games are one medium of cultural expression among many others. It requires an equally close cultural and historical reading and if so intended we should read it as art. Art calls for reflection, no matter which media. Technology that lacks agency is reduced to yet another societal flicker that "remote-triggers" our actions, rewarding us with short lasting and inconsequential pleasures.