View From the Bushes

Today's interesting article is all about the politics of video games. The central point it makes is that video games are increasingly including more and more 'real world' modeling in their game play. The question the author asks is whether those models end up with a certain political slant. Of course, other forms of entertainment have certainly made political statements. Theatre, movies, music, TV and certainly the radio all have overtly political examples, but thus far video games, being a relatively new medium, have escaped that, but for how long?

My interest in this topic is two-fold. First, there's the part of me that's less interested in the how video games might reflect the 'real world' but how the 'real world' is reflected in video games (a point the author also touches on). Particularly in the arena of the massively multi-player genre, game designers are finding that economic laws, societal interaction, law enforcement issues and the like all translate surprisingly well from the real world to the virtual -- although often with a twist. In the real world, scarcity is very often the controlling factor in economics; in the virtual world where anything can be created with a few lines of code, it's more often a problem of over-abundance.

Secondly, as virtual worlds get more and more 'accurate,' it may be possible to study things which are impossible to study with live subjects or on a sufficiently large scale or without violating standards of political correctness. Which takes us back to the subject of politics. So much of the political rhetoric is based on fairly shaky, if not non-existent facts and statistics. Take the Bush tax cuts for example: did they stimulate the economy? Did they pull us out of a recession? Personally I'm inclined to think they did, but there are so many factors involved in the economy of the United States that it's difficult to tell with any certainty, and any figures we do collect are only on what did happen. It's exceptionally difficult to get any hard numbers on what might have happened.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross