Frontlines: Fuel for War is a new video game that is about one thing: A world war in 2030 fought for the last supplies of oil.
In a CNN Money article "Peak oil: The video game" there is the usual marketing-hype-as-news. What is more pathetic than the free advertising came from the the sole academic in the news story.
"They could in fact lead to changes in attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately, changes in behavior," said Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who studies the effects of video games on people.
"It may well change attitudes towards the use of these tactics as a political tool," he said. Players may think "of course we have to use military tactics to go take oil."
Is Craig Anderson an adult? I mean the kind that can vote, pay their own rent, watch a movie with some sense of timeline coherence? His multi-faceted confusion about politics concerns me, and I find it strange he is deemed an expert/gatekeeper on the effects of games on our psychology, and politics. He doesn't even have the meaning of politics in his head.
In the the early 1990's war between the US and Iraq that took place in Kuwait, President Bush mentioned oil resources as a reason for war in a general public speech. This is one of many public utterances regarding military tactics to take resources. But this acknowledgment of a long history in which politicians talk about war for resources misses a major overarching semantic distinction:
Politics is the process by which humans decide the allocation of resources, with war and trading as fundamental and eternal subcomponents of the term itself.
Not knowing the above is appropriate for someone that never visits a voting booth.
Knowing the meaning of politics and agreeing with the narrative assumptions in a game such as Fuel for War are two different things. e.g. Believing we should both 1) Develop other means of powering industrialized society 2) Find more cooperative ways to negotiate and pay for oil resources. I am thoroughly in that camp. Fuel for War has America fighting China and Russia. Such an uncool scenario to me.
But I wouldn't be thinking it is "uncool" if I had the mind Craig Anderson assumes I have. I wouldn't know the problem domain at all.
Posts
