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Games

NYT's "Games To Avoid" an Ironic, Perfect Gamer Wish List 189

MojoKid writes "From October to December, the advertising departments of a thousand companies exhort children to beg, cajole, and guilt-trip their parents for all manner of inappropriate digital entertainment. As supposedly informed gatekeepers, we sadly earthbound Santas are reduced to scouring the back pages of gaming review sites and magazines, trying to evaluate whether the tot at home is ready for Big Bird's Egg Hunt or Bayonetta. Luckily, The New York Times is here to help. In a recent article provokingly titled 'Ten Games to Cross off Your Child's Gift List,' the NYT names its list of big bads — the video games so foul, so gruesome, so perverse that we'd recommend you buy them immediately — for yourself. Alternatively, if you need gift ideas for the surly, pale teenager in your home whose body contains more plastic then your average d20, this is the newspaper clipping to stuff in your pocket. In other words, if you need a list like this to understand what games to not stuff little Johnny's stocking with this holiday season, you've got larger issues you should concern yourself with. We'd suggest picking up an auto-shotty and taking a few rounds against the horde — it's a wonderful stress relief and you're probably going to need it."

Comment The number one entertainment medium (Score 1) 539

I dug up some numbers years back - I should get more up to date ones, but at the time, computer & videogames were around a 10 billion dollar a year industry. Movies were too if you just counted box office, and didn't add in video rentals and sales, licensed toys and merchandise, etc. Radio, magazines, and books each weighed in at around 20 billion a year. Television was 40 billion a year. At the same time, telephone service was a $172 billion a year industry. Is all of that for entertainment purposes? Of course not. Many calls are for business purposes, medical emergencies, etc. etc. But estimate what percentage of phone calls you think are leisure related & multiply it by that 172 billion - unless you guess pretty low, it's still the world's number one entertainment medium. Games like WOW may not be the most ideal place for it to "fit in" in some ways. That just says to me that games where voice chat fits in perfectly with what people are wanting to do will, someday, possibly be much bigger than WOW. With seven million players, about 1 in 1000 humans on the earth plays WOW. How many of the earth's humans like "talking to other people" as one of their very most favorite things to do? Regarding the 11 year old group leader, by the way - this is part of the "future shock" inherent in moving from the physical labor era, where small kids couldn't do work with economic value as effectively as full-grown adults, to the intellectual labor era, where sometimes they can. This suggests that some of them would/should/could be taken more seriously, given more freedom or authority, etc. But of course we're not used to that, and social change takes a while to catch up with new underlying realities. America is still gradually adjusting its culture about sex decades after we invented birth control pills and blood tests for all known STDs.
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I participated and posted as an AC, near the bottom (CDX From someone who was there). It never got modded up, so I guess no one ever saw it. Oh well.

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