Courtesy of colleague researcher and gamedesigner Gonzalo Frasca: Kabuul Kaboom - a game you cannot win...Made as a kind of response to the game New York Defender which Jill presented the other day, asking why she has enjoyed to play it? Are we allowed to have fun while we play games of this nature? I think so - if they are good games [disclaimer] and games are not per se reflections of the real world, so playing a game with an "evil" theme does not mean that you want to perform "evil" things in real life[disclaimer], they entertain and engage you for the same reasons that other good games entertain you (for discussions of what good games are, try looking at Ludology.org, Ludologica or Jesper Juuls homepage). And why should not games comment - in their own way - on what happens in the world? Novels, films, paintings and other "artistic" means of expression have done that for centuries and to my knowledge, no-one ever put a ban on people looking at Picasso's Guernica. Should what validates a commentary (be it ironic or serious) be it's mode of contemplation? That is, is it only valid as commentary if we have to apply intellectual reflection to understand it? If that is the claim, what about pop- and performance art? Other media forms have also used other modes than that of the intellectual-only to make a comment, make us stop and look at the world from another perspective, just for a brief while...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:20