Culture Clips: Video Games
Entertainment and its impact on today's culture
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- Culture Clips: Video Games
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Did You Know?
- One more illustration of how huge video games are getting: Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski is set to helm an upcoming movie version of the popular 2007 M-rated game BioShock. [Source: usatoday, 5/12/08; Reuters, 5/9/08]
- A two-year study of 1,200 middle school children by Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olsen, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, showed that playing video games was a near-universal activity among children. One of the most surprising revelations, however, was how popular M-rated games were among girls. The controversial Grand Theft Auto franchise was the girls' second favorite (in terms of time spent playing) after The Sims. The study also indicated a link between playing M-rated games and aggressive behavior. Among female gamers, 40% of those who played M games had been in a fight in the past year, compared to just 14% for those who didn't play any M-rated titles. [Source: Reuters, 5/13/08 stats, c&e]
Quotes
"I lobbied hard not to make a first-person-shooter game but to make it more like Myst, which was a great, interesting puzzle you tried to solve—you know, to play with [Jason Bourne's] amnesia or his memory. [The game developers] weren't interested. They made the [game] anyway, without my likeness." —actor Matt Damon, on why he wasn't involved with the upcoming video game The Bourne Conspiracy, which is based on the big-screen Bourne trilogy. Damon's mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, commented further on her son's refusal to participate in the game. "Matt and I don't share the same views about violence in adult films," she said. "But we do see eye-to-eye on the importance of protecting children. We both support regulations to stop the marketing of violence in films to children through violent toys, products and video games." [Source: mtv.com, 5/1/08]
"Grand Theft Auto IV's first-week performance represents the largest launch in the history of entertainment, and we believe these retail sales levels surpass any movie or music launch to date." —Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take Two Interactive Software (Rockstar's parent company) [Source: reuters.com, 5/7/2008]
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