At last, I feel that I see a glimmer of hope in the future of the video game
market. This is a pivotal and essential transformation for the video game
industry as it begins to assess exactly how much influence it have and
understand how it can better yield its power to the benefit of all mankind.
Video game up until this point have simply played into the most base and
delinquent desires of the young males that they target. Video Games with
the soul premise of blowing off people's heads and possible seeing a scantily
clad virtual fem-bot were all that the market really had to offer and naturally
with a whole generation becoming unnaturally addicted to the indulgent
brain-pork rinds experts began to see a clear link to violent behavior and
excessive video game exposure.
With this realization it is a bit of a wonder that no one until now hade thought
,"Hey, if we can get them to do bad stuff...I wonder if we can get them to do
good stuff, too?!" Well, better late then never, and the Games for Change
Conference is making the move to bring awareness and activism to the couches of
gamers everywhere. Video Game like "Darfur is Dying" and " PeacerMaker" both
give shelter players the knowledge that there are such problem in the world, and
they also begin to address how to empathize and therefore positively effect the
situation.
Much of the issue lies with awareness, and not in the headline, sound bite kind
of way but in the type of awareness that can incite true empathy, which in turn
will create more of an atmosphere of positive change. the first comforting sign
is that the Conference itself is growing with enthusiasm among designers, from
starting with a mere forty just two years ago, to blowing up to two hundred and
fifty people, "We believe in the power
of interactive media and we think it has a lot of positive potential. Just by
putting someone in the shoes of the other side, they may think of a perspective
they might not have thought of before."
