Are games too much like pornography?
Are games too much like pornography?
Are games too much like pornography?
By Brendan Sinclair
February 28, 2024
Summary
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before.
So if you came here expecting some hot, hot games industry B2B discussion about pornography, I'm sorry to say all I have to offer you is a column about educational video games hype.
"There's a whole bunch of side effects and problems that have been caused by games. And games have kind of taken over. Games are now monopolizing the attention of the digital natives that are growing up, so this is an issue."
Halfway into his 20-minute presentation, Hawkins finally came to the main point, which is that games are perceived as a social ill because kids are too obsessed with them and it has ruined their ability to learn anything at all.
Take-Two didn't announce a new BioShock until late 2019, and even then, it wasn't so much a "Hey we have a new BioShock game!" as it was a "Hey, we just started a new studio to make a BioShock game!" More than four years later, we're still waiting to get our first look at the work that studio has done on the game.
Sulyok would backtrack on those comments when challenged, but the fact that an executive could promote their business by talking about how they actively avoid games for women should give you an idea about how sexism was just like background radiation in the games industry in 2014, something we'd all been stewing in for years and had been taken largely for granted.
Good Call, Bad Call: Having left Epic Games and its Gears of War Xbox franchise in favor of the digital distribution-dominated PC space, Cliff Bleszinski said the old way of promoting games with a Game Informer cover and an E3 reveal is dead. Ten years down the road, the E3 reveal part is absolutely dead considering E3 itself no longer exists, and the Game Informer cover doesn't hold the same clout it used to.
Reference
Sinclair, B. (2024, February 28). Are games too much like pornography? GamesIndustry.biz. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/are-games-too-much-like-pornography-10-years-ago-this-month