Do other mediums put down gaming because they are threatened by it?

[CasioCoal]

Television, movies and the news have been known to put down, belittle and sometimes completely freak out over games. Look at the movie Gamer (we are all super obese creepy sweaty people), or allot of the procedural cop shows (games motivate us to kill people) or the news (we keep killing people because of games).

None of this is reality, but its a fiction that these other medias push forard to help promote a stereotype of people who play games as leeches/creepy/violent/losers.

For the most part I assume this is a general fear thing, people fear the NEW (just like rock music, comics) so just sell them what they fear. But I am beginning to wonder if its also because these other medias are scared that they are losing customers and thus money to games.

I watch about an hour of TV a week, I spend time that I would probably use watching TV playing games instead. This is lost ratings for television and therefore lost money for TV execs. I assume that these guys realise we don't have infinite time to consume all types of media, and gaming is a new media that threatens to take away viewers. Is this another reason to pay out gamers, because they are scared of losing money?

 

[dangitall]

They are just scared of it because it's still considered to be a new media. The amount of immersion and entertainment a game provides can sometimes be intimidating to non-gamers, but the news press and the non-gamer generations are perhaps... too scared of it. Probably only because it's new.

 

[Mudze]

It's not the mediums, it's the people in the mediums. A lot of them are old and neophobic, and aren't -just- scared because of the threat to their medium.

 

[Vault101]

from an outsiders perspective games are violent and angey things who apeal to angry young male teenagers and the socially inept (again sterotypes) so its understandable why older people dont like videogames

 

[Eldarion]

Gaming does tend to make a pretty easy target of itself. Just saying.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The news mediums are the ones to put it down, and they aren't threatened by the games as such. They are just scare-mongering cause it sells.

On the other hand, if they were threatened by it, I could well imagine them to be worse. Remember the mass panic the US radio production of War of the Worlds caused way back when? That was made up by the US newspapers to discredit the radio.

 

[Verrenxnon]

"Threatened" might not be so accurate as "ignorant to." As with every medium, video games have their own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. The threat of them taking over seems less than knowing that certain genres and topics will be best covered by games and some will not. You don't see too many theatrical medical dramas, but they're rampant in TV.

Movies are known for competing against television shows. Considering the increasing number of movies aimed at the video-game audience, it's likely that Hollywood depends on the gaming community, at least in part, to figure out what projects to greenlight. The same goes for all the books based on or written about games. In this way, I imagine you'll see the various medias working in tandem.

 

[Harkon]

Actually all this hate against video games isn't new. Books at one time were considered a waste of time (this was way back in the middle ages when people had work on their farms to live. Later it was TV (see Fahrenheit 451) then it was rock music, then it was D&D. As video games become more mainstream most people won't complain about them and honestly few people do today. As far as motive is concerned, I don't think other mediums are that scared of games. Most of the hate seems to come from the fact that games are still considered toys and of course the stereotype of the "basement dweller."
What we should take from this is every new culture force meets resistance from established ones (there was this old victorian book where the protagonist spent like 17 pages killing himself and it caused a major backlash) and in time games will be just as acceptable as going to the movies or watching T.V.

 

[Laurie Barnes]

I personally support this belief, because I game most of the time not because I am a nerd or hardcore, though I may be both, but because I hate commercials with a fiery passion that could easily lead to bodily harm. Games have no commercials, with a slim few exceptions, and thats why I love them over TV. Realistically if even a handful of other people do this, not only are the channels losing ratings but the commercials are losing consumers.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

I'm relatively certain that's not why games tend to be looked down upon. Games tend to be looked down upon for a couple of big reasons.

The first is that we are just now in the midst of one of the generations of people who grew up with games and still play them. If you talk to some of the older folks you know, you'll find that for them playing games wasn't even an option when they were kids, so they didn't grow up with them, but their kids played games, and so they've made the false assumption that games are for kids. Now, however, their kids are grown up, they still play games and are open to them in ways that people who never played them as kids simply aren't.

The second is that gaming is a pretty young undeveloped medium. For most of history art has been limited to non-interactive pieces. People are still trying to figure out how to actually use the language of games to say something with some depth, and we're just barely getting started. I'm an art major, and I think one of the things that is more difficult to pick up, but very rewarding once you have picked it up, is learning how to read the language of a picture. While you can look at a picture in a purely aesthetic sense, most artists have a language they work in to create meaning within the aesthetic elements of the picture. But people have been developing the language of pictures for thousands of years. Games are a different story, we're just now starting to find the languages with which games can have deeper meaning, it's not very well developed yet, so it can be difficult for people to understand the meaning of a game, especially if they've never played a game. These people don't realize that there's a language at all, or perhaps only see the games that don't have some greater depth, so they assume that games are just another soulless pop-culture entertainment.

The third is that games often do portray themselves as immature. From the way that we portray characters (hyper-masculine men and blatantly sexualized women) to the way that our games tend to address serious problems (there's a problem, there are some motherfuckers who caused the problem, I'll kill the motherfuckers, problem solved). While some games already have, a lot of games need to grow up, and it is these immature games which the non-gaming public is exposed to. They see the obvious immaturity of it, and assume that gaming as a hobby must be a waste of time for immature people.

There are lots of other reasons that gaming gets put down too, but these three seem like the big ones to me.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I personally support this belief, because I game most of the time not because I am a nerd or hardcore, though I may be both, but because I hate commercials with a fiery passion that could easily lead to bodily harm. Games have no commercials, with a slim few exceptions, and thats why I love them over TV. Realistically if even a handful of other people do this, not only are the channels losing ratings but the commercials are losing consumers.

This is a trend that saddens me, actually. I'd gladly take a couple of five minute commercial breaks per episode if Hulu would stop with the Hulu Plus nonsense, but apparently I'm in the minority. Granted, commercials don't work very well in videogames; Id software made a huge deal out of Quake Live being ad supported, but gamers were too busy playing to notice the ads, and they had to add in paid accounts to keep it afloat.

OT: Nah, the old media isn't afraid of videogames. Net 2.0? Sure, but not videogames. If anyone is worried about videogames, it's Milton Bradley, not Fox. As other people have stated, the news media reports negatively on videogames because it brings in huge ratings -- both from the older generation, and from gamers who start gearing up the angry email machines before the report even comes on.

Edit: I need to stop writing while tired. My point with the advertising stuff is that content has to be paid for somehow, and advertising in material that has breaks for advertising built in is far preferable to shelling out money for it, at least a large percentage of the time. It's annoying on movies, but TV shows from most non-British content producers are made with that format in mind, so it's not like the ads are detracting from the experience. Besides, I'd much rather sit through some commercials than shell out $20 or more for a season boxed set -- although I have to say, Wal-Mart has the right idea with their budget TV on DVD line. I've been picking up Stargate SG-1 for $10 a season, which makes it comparable with Steam sales on the dollar per hour scale.

 

[Stig_Helmer]

It's always the same thing when a new media becomes big and gain an audience.

Just give it time, and games will become more and more accepted, although I don't think it ever will be looked upon the same way that books and films are. Who knows, maybe some day people will look at Gabe Newell the way people look at Ingmar Bergman. Time will tell!