What a difference a year makes, Michael Samyn (Tale of Tales) paraphrases Leigh Alexander's "Gamers' don't have to be your audience" article, Gamasutra's readers don't seem to be co... [x-post reddit] Some striking similarities between both articles: Michaël Samyn: > A game industry that caters to such people is at least guilty of supplying the most horrible specimens of our societies with an excuse to feel good about themselves. Leigh Alexander: > You don’t want to ‘be divisive?’ Who’s being divided, except for people who are okay with an infantilized cultural desert of shitty behavior and people who aren’t? What is there to ‘debate’? Michaël Samyn: > The game industry actively breeds a group of belligerent hooligans for profit. Leigh Alexander: > It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. Michaël Samyn: > We don’t need theories about the correlation between violent games and violent behavior. Many players of violent and antagonistic games engage in violent and antagonistic behavior. Whether violent people are attracted to games or games arouse violent emotions is irrelevant. Anyone who has ever been attacked by a gamer lynch party knows that a certain number of people who play antagonistic and violent games are aggressive, intolerant, reactionary, misogynist, and so on. Leigh Alexander: > It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist America -- not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anxiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the inside. The main arguments in both articles are pretty much identical, astonishing to re-read them almost a year later, this explains how ToT could run into this Sunset desaster. Sources: Samyn: https://archive.is/FQDnp Alexander: https://archive.is/tj7Bc This post was mirrored from http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3cx524/what_a_difference_a_year_makes_michael_samyn_tale/ and may have been edited at the original location.