Ready for a stimulating piece of reading? It's ok, I promise it won't hurt. The New York Times has a feature article from this Sunday about the marketing of a new game system from Hasbro. It sounds trite at first but it gets into some very interesting subjects - everything from playground dynamics to the inevitable violence in video games.
Henry Jenkins, the director of the media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has analyzed the Mom problem. He argues that video games, far from being a corruption of traditional childhood, actually embody the classic boyhood themes celebrated by previous generations and writers like Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Video games offer boys a chance to explore, fight, master manly skills, make scatological jokes and act out fantasies that would appall their mothers. But whereas boys used to hop the fence and play away from home, today Mom can always look over and see what they're doing on the computer. "Mothers come face to face with the messy process by which Western culture turns boys into men."This is some excellent reading, folks, and I recommend it to everyone who wants to get a better handle on the gaming world. The New York Times site requires a registration, but you can view the article here if you don't want to register. Thanks Quarter To Three.