Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Games of the 2000s

Regardless of how you calculate the relative profits of the industries, a crossover point was reached sometime in the first decade of the 21st century, after which games were acknowledged to economically outperform the film and television industries combined. At the same time, the image of games in popular culture was subjected to increasingly blunt critiques for their potentially deleterious effects on social behavior, especially among children. The most common tropes to emerge in the cinematic and televisual depiction of games during the 2000s focuses on three general areas of concern: Violence, Sexuality and Social Normativity.

The 2000s also saw the emergence of a strong independent games movement as well as organizations supporting development of games that focus on education, political causes and social justice activism, such as the Serious Games Initiative, which began in 2002, and Games for Change, which was founded in 2004. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation also initiated its Digital Media and Learning initiative, which devoted significant resources to the study and support for games as an integral part of emerging cultural and academic discourses about civic engagement and youth learning. Within the realm of commercial film and television production, however, a majority of on-screen games continued to be associated with narratives related to antisocial stereotypes. This path presents a variety of examples that support these mainstream tropes, while acknowledging the existence of counter currents and contradictions that also appeared on film and TV during this time.

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