October 2nd Lecture

In Thursday's lecture we discussed various types of war games and how some games are now attempting to raise serious issues and stimulate debate. One such game was a simple game called September 12th, a very controversial game which was based on 9/11.

September 12th:
At first glance this just appears to be just another cross hair shooter, but this game is different, if you accidentally kill an innocent civilian with a stray bullet then others will gather around the dead civilian and they will become terrorists themselves, September 12th message appears to be that that our actions have consequences, and that we should attempt to understand what makes people become terrorists in the first place in order to prevent it happening again rather than just dismissing them as "evil-doers" who hate us because they hate freedom. As Wardrip-Fruin puts it, the goal of the game is to develop in the player "empathy for the people who will become terrorists out of that experience, of having seen innocent people killed."
This game caused quite a stir when it came out and even resulted in hate mail for the creator of the game.

In the past games have been criticised for just being mindless fun(not that I think there is anything wrong with mindless fun) but at the same time when games try to raise serious issues they tend to get criticized by people claiming these issues are too serious for a game to deal with, I for one hope that games will continue to deal with important issues more and more and evolve in the same way the movie industry did