"Wielding Swords in a World of Sharp Tongues "

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/arts/television/04nier.html?ref=technology

I stumbled upon this article in The New York Times earlier and it really caught my attention. Even though I'm not a gamer or anything, the article talks about whether or not the Supreme Court will regulate "the sales of video games to minors in a way that has not applied to books, films, visual art, music and other media." This is due to the sexually explicit material and the violence in some of these video games. And if the court chooses to do this, it will be able to regulate society's definition of what is "obscene" and states will be able to regulate the video games that it thinks is violent.

The article goes on to argue about how the justsices on the Supreme Court has never actually understood the video games because they've never sat down and played them -- "rather than merely viewed, (the games) need to be fully comprehended." The author of the article argues for a game called Nier. Nier has many features that differs it from other games (you can read about its story line in the article), but one thing that stood out to me the most was that some of the game's most powerful moments are presented as "white text on a black screen" -- it forces the reader to read. The point is, great games are not always about the graphic (something we talked about in class, as something as easy and simple as Farmville) but about what it provokes to the people playing it. This goes back to the whole idea of the telegraph and now Twitter -- simple technologies that allow people to connect with each other in a "third world" dimension.

(Posted by Kristie Dinh)