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Video games have a very interesting history in how they have devolved into an entertainment mecca of negative perceptions. Unfortunately, the process of influencing the direction of violence and sex in games has less to do with condemnation and more to do with simple economic, positive reinforcement. I say this having worked in the computer gaming field during the early days of video game creation.
I worked for a software company that was eventually bought by a much larger corporation, but one thing that always stood out at the company where I worked was that the people working there developing games were thinking first of what would be fun and how to make that fun transfer to everyone. We started with the company owner's first vision of creating a city that culminated in a game that is probably one of the best selling games of all time. There was absolutely no violence in the game, at all. From there, the company created all sorts of games that were children-friendly, and then branched out into games that were adult-friendly, but at the same time designed so that kids could play the same games and have as much fun. I probably don't have to name the company for people to figure out which one I'm talking about.
The company dabbled in a few more violent titles, and they did not sell well, so the company went back to doing what it did well, and that company did brilliantly until they were bought by a behemoth of a company that buys companies and then melts the intellectual properties of those companies into its own vision. The original founder of the first company is still heavily involved in the intellectual ideas, but as the company is more a part of a larger corporation now, the games tend to be part of all sorts of other games, some violent and some extremely violent, than they ever were before.
The point of all this information is two things I noticed during the early years. First, there were a lot more women involved in the production stage of this company's gaming than in most other companies. Believe it or not, that made a huge difference in how games were perceived. The highest selling game of all time, which still holds the record if you don't count that colossus that makes that MMORPG everyone knows, which may or may not have the record these days, came from this earlier company, even after the company was melted into the larger corporation. When women were involved in the production stage, the original ideal of a game being fun so that both men and women
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Video games have a very interesting history in how they have devolved into an entertainment mecca of negative perceptions.
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Violence and video games: Why the ESRB ratings aren't working
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