03-28-2005, 10:19 PM
I think some of the hysteria comes from where video games is right now. It's making quite a lot of money supposedly, yet it's still not at the level of mainstream acceptability and accessibility as say, movies and books. (Some of it comes with the territory I guess, you don't need a lot of special equipment to go see the latest movie.)
It's almost like pornographic movies. There's people that thinks it's a horrid thing and it should be abolished. But nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find many people that want to abolish not only porn flicks, but -all- movies, period. They don't lump the medium with the message to (badly) paraphrase some guy named Mcluhan.
Though I do still see some of that with things like cartoons\animations, and comics. In Europe and Asia they don't seem to have a problem with just using the medium to tell a story. In North America there's still some stigma attached to it, cartoons and comics are suitable only for children and maybe immature adults.
I think this is where video games is at currently. I personally think if videogames is to ever 'mature', it will need to reach a point where people can accept a video game can have trash as well as treasure. Just like any other media.