Topic Essay

Daniel Wise

3/19/07

Gaming Under Siege

Video games have come a long way since the days of Atari 2600 and arcades. What once began as simple time wasters now has evolved into a $12 Billion industry. Games began with simple premises and virtually no plot. Games like Tetris and Space invaders simply started off straight to the point where the player has no particular goals except to reach a high score on the leader board. However, now games have reached a stage where mature themes thrive and cause controversy in today’s world. Gaming has come under scrutiny of the government and religious groups for these mature themes while industry executives, gamers and game journalists have met this onslaught with a resolve to keep gaming in its current state.

The gaming industry has now evolved into something that can rival Hollywood productions and award winning novels. Today, video games contain intricate plots, character development and situations that can provoke meaningful thought. When the video game industry started out some twenty or thirty years ago, developers consisted of small teams of programmers that handled the sound, design and coding all at the same time during the production of the game. Today, development teams can average between twenty to fifty people, some can even reach into the hundreds. The growth of development teams has allowed smaller teams to handle different aspects of creating a video game. These can all centralize their efforts into these different areas of development that include programming, graphic design, sound design, level design and story development.

With the inclusion of advanced technology and Hollywood story production, mature themes have arisen in games creating a public outcry against these themes. The current technology that developers are capable of using has allowed them to create grizzly, violent themes that one would expect to see in horror movies. Stories have also included such topics like sex, violence, drugs and alcohol.

The gaming industry, like the movie and television industries, has come to compromises with society creating a rating system that informs parents and gamers of the material that is included within the game. The gaming industry is not all blood and gore though, proving this by creating games that have thought provoking stories without including a single drop of blood or word of vulgar language. I hope to inform people of the video game industry though this essay and prove that there is substance without violence.