Цитаты из книги Кодзима – гений

It doesn’t help that during this period, games never even tried to be relevant to modern culture at large in the same way that movies and TV did. They didn’t join the social conversation around hot topics or dramatize the human condition. They didn’t push agendas and thereby receive the loud approval of snobs, activist groups, and scholars. Hollywood would never consider them “art.” They were good at making lots of money and killing a lot of free time, but that was about it—disposable junk food for the mind, mostly.

It may have been the marketing strategy some may remember from TV and magazines, in which gaming companies deliberately targeted boys in their ads. The bizarre lengths to which gaming ads went in order to ostracize females and pander to boys is enough to make one pause and wonder if the firms hired to make these ads didn’t have ulterior motives. Blatantly sexist, anti-women slogans, images, and concepts directly pit games (and by extension, gamers) against women, with games being marketed as the winner boys ought to choose. Then again, pandering to males made the most logical sense in some ways. The ‘90s wave of feminism was perceived as “no-fun-allowed” political correctness, and the aggressive attempt to show women as superior to men was taken as provocation by iconic voices in the world of stand-up comedy, which dominated the discussion of current events at the time. The men-versus-women debate was a hallmark of ‘90s culture, explored everywhere. Why shouldn’t games help men fight back, or at least cope?

Today’s average gamer may not remember the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, when the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was assaulted by evangelicals who feared that the pen-and-paper hobby was a gateway into mysticism and the occult, but it stands as an early example of children’s games being demonized as serious social problems. It spread across society like wildfire, fueled by half-informed observations and the occasional unverified shock story about what could happen when you started rolling the dice. Parents didn’t want their kids turning into sedentary, antisocial nerds playing out unhealthy fantasies in simulated worlds;